Peter Kline | December 2015

Kim Addonizio

EXCERPT

Kim Addonizio has been called “one of our nation’s most provocative and edgy poets.” A writer in several genres, she has published six books of poetry, two novels from Simon & Schuster, and two books on writing, The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius, both from W. W. Norton. Her second story collection, The Palace of Illusions, was recently published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull. Addonizio has garnered numerous awards for her work: a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award, and Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and several times on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.” Addonizio has a growing international presence as well; a New & Selected Poems was published in Arabic by Kalima Press, and another New & Selected, Wild Nights, is out this fall from the UK’s Bloodaxe Books.

Addonizio also plays blues harmonica and is a founding member of Nonstop Beautiful Ladies, a word/music performance group. She currently divides her time between Oakland, CA and New York City. She also volunteers with The Hunger Project, a global organization empowering the poorest people in the world to end their own hunger and poverty (www.thp.org) and is online at www.kimad donizio.com.

Peter Kline: You’re known primarily as a poet, but you’ve also published two novels, and your second collection of stories, The Palace of Illusions, is just out in paperback. When did you make the move to fiction?

Kim Addonizio: I started writing fiction in my early thirties, a few years after I started poetry. Unless you count ten pages of a mystery novel I wrote at ten. I gave up because it was too hard. I gave up on fiction many times over the years, for the same reason, but I kept coming back to it, too, trying to understand how to write a story.

Kline: I know of many poets who seriously consider working on a fiction project—and not just for the fabled financial reasons!—but somehow the leap seems tricky to negotiate for most. Tell us a little bit about The Palace of Illusions. What kinds of stories are you telling, and why? What unites the stories in the collection?

Addonizio: It’s about the illusions that sustain us, and the ones that get in our way. That’s a sort of general theme. The character in the title story is remembering his youth working for a traveling carnival. There’s a half-vampire college student who’s trying to come to terms with her dual nature, a love triangle involving a lonely woman artist and a younger couple, a cancer patient taking her first poetry class. A couple of pieces reimagine fairy tales. Transformation is the essence of life, whether magical or mundane. It’s necessary. Everything changes, and we have to, too, if we’re going to survive. How do we change when the previous order of things—which is really just a momentary stability, probably because we’re not yet seeing the movement underneath—inevitably shifts?

Kline: While history provides us with many examples of writers who excelled in both poetry and prose, a stubborn sense sometimes persists among writers of both genres that the genre-divide is absolute—that fiction writers should not “dabble” in poetry, that poets should not “sell out” by writing prose. Obviously this is a viewpoint you do not share! But have you ever experienced pressure of this kind when negotiating your own identity as a writer?

Addonizio: Oh, the genre Nazis. Writing is writing. And some of the best of it lives at the boundaries, or rather, ignores them. Anne Carson, for example. I’m not concerned about what genre I write in—it’s all expression. Though it takes a while to learn the limits and possibilities of different genres. Poetry taught me to write a good sentence, to find the precise, accurate word, to develop my metaphorical imagination. All that was invaluable for my prose style—styles, rather. It didn’t teach me about plot, though. But everything’s a container for experience or thought. One day I might pour it into an essay, and on another day, if I’m at work on a story or novel or poem, something that just happened or that I heard about will make its way in.

When I’m asked to read somewhere, the presenter always means a poetry reading. But I’ve published about as much prose as poetry, and right now I’m writing essays. I just sold a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress, to Viking/Penguin. So who the hell knows. I keep following what interests me. I am, as playwright Tom Stoppard once said of himself, a fatal victim of multiple fascination.

Kline: Palace is a second short story collection; the first, In the Box Called Pleasure, was published in 1999. What drew you back to writing stories? How do you differentiate between short story material and the material for a novel?

Addonizio: Stories drew me back to stories. I think the resurgence probably started a few summers ago in Lisbon, when I heard George Saunders read a devastating one. It electrified me and I felt the power of the form all over again. Then I was on a fellowship in Italy, supposedly to write poetry, but I was really reading Lydia Davis and rereading Paul Bowles and other writers and roughing out drafts of stories. As for stories vs. novels, it’s hard to say. My first novel, Little Beauties, started as a short story. At least, that’s what I thought it was going to be when I began writing it. By the time the third character in the book wandered in, I realized I was in for something bigger. My first reaction was, “Oh, fuck, not a novel.”

Kline: Yes—many poets thrive on the nimbleness of always leaping from new work to new work—as Frost said, “Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks.” It’s an entirely different rhythm to stay focused on a single piece. Starting a novel can put a real crimp in summer plans—and next summer’s plans too! How are the stories in The Palace of Illusions different from the first collection? What new challenges did you set for yourself in your return to the genre?

Addonizio: That early collection was more experimental. I was heavily under the influence when I wrote it—the influence, that is, of Kathy Acker. I wanted to say the most extreme things I could think of. I wanted a certain territory—basically sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. But I was also trying to figure out just what a story was, trying different forms: short-shorts, a piece on condoms written as a scholarly paper with footnotes, another that moved its plot forward by repeated use of the word “but.” This collection is more traditional, the characters more—what’s the term—well-rounded? It sounds horrifying. Who wants to be well-rounded? Ugh. Let’s just say that I hope they approach the complexities of what it means to be human and trying to find your way. And realizing how often you are the boulder in your path. I also hope I finally learned one of the basic lessons of fiction: don’t make your characters passive. Make them act. I’ve had the hardest time learning that.

Kline: Get that boulder rolling! What is the relationship between your poetry writing and your fiction writing? Do you feel there are special advantages or disadvantages to working in both genres? 

Addonizio: With both poetry and prose, the writing takes me into an alternate universe, into nonordinary reality. That’s where I want to be almost all the time. Being able to spend time inside a character’s head—I love that about writing short stories and novels. In a poem, maybe, I’m more inside the head of the character who is “me.” I’m more often trying to catch hold of an idea in a poem, whereas in a story I’m just trying to intuit what has to happen next. I’m not thinking a lot about what things mean beyond themselves. I have this faith that if I can tell the story right, something more will come out of it. Whereas with poetry, I’m usually very conscious of pursuing a theme that emerges out of the writing. I don’t start with an idea, in either case. That would kill the fun, and maybe keep the piece from happening. I think everyone should at least try writing in more than one genre, the way musicians often play several instruments besides their primary one. Writing poetry can help fiction writers enormously. They don’t seem to believe it, often, but it happens to be true. A lot of playwrights began as poets, too. Actually I’m not sure it works in reverse…

Kline: Perhaps it has to do with the disciplined, close attention to language that poetry requires, which serves writing of all kinds. Studying poetry isn’t the only way to learn this, but it’s hard to get very far as a poet without it. How do you recognize what kind of material belongs in a poem, and what kind in a story? Have you ever attempted to address the same material in both genres?

Addonizio: I recently wrote an essay about finding a mouse caught in a glue trap. Then I used that image in a poem. In the poem, the mouse plays a very small part, especially because I’m less interested these days in following a single narrative in a poem. In the essay, I explored the whole experience—finding the mouse, figuring out what to do with it, etc. It would seem logical that some forms are more capacious, but I don’t know. Look how much emotion even a small poem can contain. Even though there may be a kind of rise and fall in a poem, I think of it as the form that has maximum intensity. At least if we’re talking about a short lyric. In a novel, you can’t sustain that. You have to orchestrate a bit more, I think. That would be a great writing exercise: to take the same experience and write it as a poem, a story, and an essay, to see how it morphs.

Kline: In an earlier interview, you say that, in your experience as a writer of both genres, “poetry is a little harder to surface from” than prose. Can you speak more about this? How do your ways of thinking, routines, writing strategies, etc., change when you switch from one genre to another?

Addonizio: I suppose what I haven’t said yet is that with prose—especially with a novel—I’m hitting it nearly every day. It’s the only way I can do it. Two pages, then two more pages, then two more—that’s how I wrote my novels. I had to get used to quitting in the middle of things and coming back the next morning. With a poem, I usually stay with it, obsessively, until I get the initial draft. And sometimes that takes a really long time, but I can’t let it go until I have some last line, even if it’s a shitty one, and it usually is. I need that click that Yeats talked about, even if it’s only a temporary click and the box springs open again in the middle of the night, or the next day. With a novel or story, I might get that with a scene or a chapter, but the final click—that’s so fucking far away. And it takes a lot of faith to even think it’s going to be there. I’ve thrown away hundreds of poems that sucked or just didn’t work out. Each was only a page or two. I’ve had to throw away a couple of novels, and that was way more painful.

Kline: You have been deeply interested in music for most of your life—in fact, I believe you were involved in music well before poetry. What was the source of that first shift in focus? What prompted you to take up music more seriously again in recent years?

Addonizio: I started playing guitar at fourteen, writing the trite, tormented love songs of youth. I studied classical voice in college for a couple of years. In my twenties I took up classical flute. I was very serious about flute, but abandoned it when I found poetry. Later I fell in love with blues harmonica and that brought music back into my life, as well as an interest in combining it with poetry. Poetry and blues harmonica: they were both like being struck by lightning.

Kline: It’s fascinating that of all of your different artistic disciplines through the years, poetry and blues hit you with the most intensity. How do you see music functioning in your poetry? How has studying and playing blues harmonica affected your work as a writer?

Addonizio: I like to think my musical training has helped me listen more acutely. Learning the blues led me to writing several poems in blues forms, as well as writing pieces meant to be paired with music. Blues has also led me into much more, like African American history and culture. Those early Delta musicians were poets, griots telling the stories of black people in the American South. When I play harmonica, I feel close to the source of poetry. When I write, I want to get close to that same source.

Kline: In an essay, Eliot argues that “The music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning”—do you find this to be the case in your own work? How, exactly, do you see music as contributing to the meaning of a poem? Is it in the melody? The rhythm? The structure? The allusive quality? Something else?

Addonizio: Someone once said that everything that happens in a poem is part of the meaning. I think that’s a great way to think about it. The meaning isn’t what you can paraphrase—it’s everything the poem does to you. Music is sounds and silence, patterned, happening in time. That’s a pretty fair definition of poetry, too. Though I sometimes feel music has an advantage over poetry, in terms of reaching people on a visceral level.

I was just reading a poem by John Beer that begins his book The Waste Land and Other Poems. So I open it up, and the first thing is a three-page visual poem in stanza blocks of seven words across and four words down, with “drip” and “drop” being the only words. My immediate reaction was to skip it. Instead I read it aloud. A whole other experience. Here’s the first stanza:

Drip drip drip drip drip drip drop

Drip drop drop drip drop drop drop

Drop drip drip  drip drip  drop drip

Drip drip  drip  drop drip drop drip

Kline: It seems to me that music translates more easily from culture to culture than poetry—we need no interpreter to be deeply moved by, say, a 13^th-century organum by Perotin, even though we may have no understanding of it (though being educated will likely allow us to hear it more fully). Do you feel music is a more primal art form? Is it possible for poetry to achieve similarly prerational effects, or must these always be a wan analogy to the effects of music?

Addonizio: Well, the example I just quoted tempts me to say, yes, poetry can get to those effects sometimes. But the Beer piece isn’t exactly a concerto, or even Steve Reich. I know some people read Ashbery and just fall over they’re so excited, even if they don’t understand a word. But for me, the way poems can communicate on a semantic level (if that’s the term) is also important. Words are a communicative tool and I want to use that tool. Say words are Kafka’s “axe for the frozen sea within us.” A piece of music is a different tool, though it may have the same aim. Even though poems can have some of the qualities of music, they aren’t the same thing. And words aren’t paint, either, but thank you anyway, Gertrude Stein. I read some writers and think, hmmm… what? Okay… kind of interesting… But, um… what?  And then I start feeling like a nonnative speaker who once said to me, “This English is like a stone on my head.” I’d rather have a hat, or a hoodie.

Kline: Many poets have incorporated music into their process of writing—I think of Hart Crane, for instance, holed up in his apartment with the phonograph playing the same aria over and over again at top volume. Such a practice suggests at least two possible functions for the music—as a source of emotional inspiration and intensity, and as a repetitive, mantra-like aid to creative meditation. Do you listen to music while you work?

Addonizio: Sometimes I listen to jazz or classical. Anything without words. Or else music with words in other languages that I can’t understand. It’s a great relief. I love looking at art for the same reason; it says something without using words. I don’t know much about visual art, so it’s not an intellectual experience for me and I’m fine with not “understanding” it. So I guess, going back to your previous question, that must be the way some people experience poetry. A sort of “What the hell? Cool.”

Kline: You have engaged in several artistic projects that combine your poetry with music, both in a CD with poet Susan Browne, Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing, and more recently in word/music presentations with fiction writer Sam Ligon and poet Gary Copeland Lilley and in your band, Nonstop Beautiful Ladies. What are the challenges and advantages of combining the two forms? How does collaborating with other artists and writers change the way you work? 

Addonizio: I’m a big fan of collaboration. It opens up your creative world and allows for synergy. But you don’t want to be the equivalent of that guy in a beret banging on his little bongos while everyone laughs behind their hands. You need to work hard to get it all to gel, and you need to find the right people to work with, who don’t inhibit you but give you a sense of possibility. Some amazing things have come out of my work with musicians and artists—not to mention other writers—and I feel lucky to have met them. In Ordinary Genius, I encourage people to collaborate with visual artists to make a broadside. To take a poem and make a movie of it, or perform it with a musician. To write on something besides a screen or paper. You can often, also, reach a wider audience when you work with other artists. We should mention here that you’re part of Nonstop Beautiful Ladies. I know that playing music with you has given me new ideas and directions for my writing.

Kline: Your newest book of poems, My Black Angel, is a collection of blues poems paired with woodcuts by Charles D. Jones. Tell me about the book and the nature of the collaboration.

Addonizio: Its first incarnation was as a limited edition art book that’s too expensive for any honorable poet. I like to take it out of its box and just smell the ink and feel the paper. The trade book is out now—they made a gorgeous hardcover. Charlie is a musician and loves the blues, so he asked if I wanted to do this project. I sent him some work, and he made the images—most he chose, and a few I suggested. I wanted to include not only some of the familiar figures, like Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins, but also to make sure blues women were represented—Lucille Bogan, for example, whom not many people know about. She wrote “Black Angel Blues,” which BB King popularized as “Sweet Little Angel.” And I wanted some contemporary women musicians in there, to say that all this is part of the tradition, too, and it’s a continuing one. Charlie’s images are stunning. And we’re almost finished making a word/music CD of the poems that has some kickass stuff on it.

Kline: Fantastic—poetry, visual art, and music all in one, exactly the kind of collaboration you’ve been advocating. How do you see your work in a music-based form like the blues as relating to your formal work that derives from a more literary tradition, such as the sonnet?

Addonizio: I’ve always liked the idea of freedom within constraints. The simple three-chord structure of the blues—how much complexity and nuance can you fit into that? Same with the sonnet. For two Aprils now, in honor of National Poetry Month, I’ve been writing daily poems on Twitter. It’s about making poetry happen in a very small space, like a haiku or landay (a two-line form sung now mostly in secret by Afghani women). Once you have any kind of limit to work with, your imagination kicks in. It likes to solve problems, to figure things out. That’s not to say I don’t love free verse, or stories that deviate from that hoary Freytag Pyramid. But everything needs a structure, and therefore a limit. It’s what happens inside that. I find Bach, who seems to me the most orderly of composers, especially profound.

Kline: Speaking of freedom and constraints—in a time when most serious poets in this country have entered the world of academia to earn their livelihoods, you have remained stalwartly independent. Why did you choose not to pursue a career as a university professor? What do you see as the advantages to remaining outside that world, and what are the drawbacks? 

Addonizio: I taught in several universities as a lecturer, and I was on the MFA faculty at Goddard’s low-residency program for a while, but my goal was always to get out of academia. On the other hand, if it weren’t for doing readings at universities, I’d probably need a second job besides the independent teaching I do. I’d love to do a writing residency at a college or university. I was the Visiting Writer at San Jose State recently, and I enjoyed being in the classroom and working with those students. But the bureaucracy and politics of universities—that stuff seems to take over, for so many people, and they stop writing, or write only in the summers. So essentially it’s fear. I’m afraid of losing that part of me that is an artist. That part is very selfish, and doesn’t want to be bothered anymore with much beyond art. So I have to sacrifice some stuff to it. Like getting my health insurance paid. This is such a big question for young writers—for all writers, really—how to make a living and keep doing your creative work. There isn’t any one answer. The university is a good place for some people. I have some very serious students, though, who do other things: graphic design, technical editing, therapy, lawyering, catering, waitressing. And I’ve met some truly heroic high school teachers who are bringing their love of writing and literature to young people. Everyone’s got to figure out how to earn a living and keep writing—and have a life. When I started writing, I was juggling work, graduate school, and joint custody of my infant daughter, and I had very little money. I have no idea how I did that. Poet Lucille Clifton had six children. Very few people have the luxury of being able to write full-time, and it’s important to recognize that early. People shouldn’t aspire to make a living by their writing, but to live by their writing—to make a meaningful life where writing has a place. Not that writers shouldn’t be paid. We should be. But it’s increasingly branding and marketing that drives book sales, and if you get too caught up in that, you could spend all your time pushing a product—or worse, creating a product—rather than trying to write something authentic and meaningful. Fuck bestsellerdom. It’s not my definition of success. Like we all have to be the prima ballerina, or we’re no good. Literature is full of weird, interesting, compelling writers. This whole star-making mentality just fuels ego and narcissism, and most of us struggle enough with that already.

Kline: Even though you have followed a career largely outside of universities, you have always made teaching a huge part of your life, both in private workshops and through your handbooks for poetry and creativity, The Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius. How has your work as a teacher affected your art? What did writing craft books teach you about your own writing?

Addonizio: I’m always reading both as a writer and as a teacher. I’ll highlight a line thinking, How did she do that? and also, Can I turn this into a writing exercise? Teaching keeps me thinking about how to make poems and how to pass on that information—at least, what part of it can be passed on. Writing those books (the first was cowritten with Dorianne Laux) helped me see not only my own aesthetics, but also my limits. I can’t write an erudite book about poetry; I’m not a scholar. The aim was to make those books useful starting points, a way in for aspiring poets. So many textbooks scare beginning students away by their size and breadth, if nothing else. Poet’s Companion and Ordinary Genius are meant to be gateway drugs. The writing exercises in both, though, can be useful for the addicted. I wrote a lot of poems using them.

Kline: I, too, have always found writing exercises useful as a way of forcing me out of my tendencies and comforts. This was especially the case as a beginning writer, when some of my greatest difficulties were the wheel-ruts of my own thinking and speaking, ruts that I couldn’t even feel until I was forced to take another path. What do you see as some of the biggest obstacles to your students’ work? What were the biggest obstacles to your own work when you were a beginning writer?

Addonizio: Some students don’t realize how much real labor is involved, or they resist it. So they go on, often for many years, wanting to get better, but not seriously reading and studying, and not writing often enough. They don’t have that passionate obsession, which is an absolute requirement. I had that, but I also had a lot of self-doubt that at times felt crippling. My second novel, My Dreams Out in the Street, took ten years because for four or five of them I couldn’t look at it and felt it was a complete failure. A little criticism made me put it away, and a small note of encouragement from another writer sent me back to it. I always try to remember how important it is to let developing writers know when I see something good happening in their work. Of course, I also try to help them accept critical comments and develop a more professional attitude toward their work. As my website notes, I’m not trained as a therapist.

Kline: Though I imagine that through the years you have sometimes been asked to fill that role! And in the intimacy, risk-taking, and self-searching of a great writing workshop, it’s easy to see why the analogy exists. Your book, Ordinary Genius, is filled with lots of great exercises designed to inspire creativity. What makes you feel creative? What do you do to invite inspiration into your life?

Addonizio: The more time I spend writing and playing music, the more inspired I feel. Reading really good work gives me a rush and makes me want to write, just like I can’t listen to a harmonica CD without running to pick up my own instrument. There’s a song by Cake I like a lot: “I just want to play on my pan pipes, I just want to drink me some wine.” That’s my ideal job description.

Kline: What is the single most important piece of advice you ever received as a writer?

Addonizio: Honestly, I don’t remember getting much advice, though there must have been plenty of it in graduate school. What I tell my students is mostly to keep going, and do the work.

Kline: When thinking back on my own experience with mentors I’m not struck by a scintillating bit of wisdom that seems to stand apart from all the others, though I got lots of good advice. But it seems to me that finding a way to sustain your passion and “keep going” has to be at the top of the list. What are you working on right now? When can we get our hands on it?

Addonizio: Hah! Well, I’m really excited about the return to fiction with The Palace of Illusions. In summer of 2016, Norton is bringing out Mortal Trash, a new book of poems. Bukowski in a Sundress will be out then, too. In the meantime, I’ve just finished a draft of a play. I don’t know what’s next, but I hope it finds me soon.      

Peter Kline teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and at Stanford University. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has also received fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and James Merrill House, and he has been honored with First Prize in the River Styx International Poetry Contest and the Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His first collection of poetry, Deviants, was published by SFASU Press in 2013.

Excerpt

from “Night Owls” in The Palace of Illusions

Sometimes I like to take off from campus and go downtown to the fancy hotels, where they have piano music and the bartenders wear tuxes.  I order a Lemon Drop and read Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen in the muted bar light, wearing a tasteful black dress, my hair piled demurely on my head, little ringlets escaping down my neck. I wait for a man to come over, which never takes long. But when I get upstairs, into a room with him, I change completely.  I order him to take his clothes off, to lie down on the bed and close his eyes.  They always smile like crazy at that point, they can’t believe their luck.  I tell him I’m going to make him feel good, and I can see he’s thinking about how he’ll tell the story the next day to his best friend at work, about meeting this girl in the hotel bar. I put my hand on him through his briefs or boxers, and remind him to keep his eyes closed. I take out my lace handkerchief, and the chloroform, and before he knows what’s happening he’s passed out and I’m straddling him, my fangs in his neck, his blood pouring down my throat.

The men I meet downtown are perfect: married, a little drunk, a little overweight.  It’s bad if they’re thin, because by the time I have my fill of a thin one he’s practically comatose. I don’t want to kill them, just feed on them enough to keep me going.  If I were a full vampire it might be different, but I’m only half, on my dad’s side.  My dad has to kill people to get enough.  I understand, I guess, but I don’t like to think about it, and I’m happy I never killed anyone.  Even the coma thing only happened once.

 

Copyright © 2014 by Kim Addonizio, from Palace of Illusions.
Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.