Ravi Shankar | September 2017

Gregory Pardlo

EXCERPT

Gregory Pardlo’s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Digest was also shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays forthcoming from Knopf. Pardlo joined the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University-Camden in the fall of 2016. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

Ravi Shankar: Here we are again, just about a year exactly from when we first spoke, and at that point the Pulitzer Prize was fairly new and I remember we spoke about community, philosophy in poetry, and the shifting aesthetic sensibilities of the Academy and how poets of color fit there. It’s unfortunate that conversation was drowned out by clinking silverware and muzak jazz, but that’s ok. We’ll start fresh. I thought we could just have a wide-ranging conversation and see where it takes us. I know we spoke last time about the composition of Totem and Digest, your translations of Danish poet Niels Lyngsø, and your first forays into writing nonfiction, and hopefully we’ll hit upon some of those subjects again today. 

But perhaps we should begin with Callaloo and what you are doing here in Providence? 

Gregory Pardlo: This is the seventh year that we’ve been at Brown. We also have workshops in Oxford, England, and in Barbados at the University of West Indies, Cape Hill. In Oxford, we have nonfiction and we’ve had Fred D’Aguiar joining us there. I did the Barbados workshop just a couple of months ago. Just before my trip to Ireland, Scotland, and Finland, by the way. I did take the family to Barbados. 

Shankar: Nice, a little island hopping! 

Pardlo: Yes, it’s been quite a trek the last year... so this is the seventh year of our main workshop. The ones overseas are week long workshops, and this one is two weeks long. And it’s really unlike any other workshop. When I say that, participants and anyone I say that to, their first reaction is often “yeah, sure. A workshop is a workshop. How much different can it really be?” But this experience is really intense and different. Vievee Francis [who also teaches at Callaloo] and I ask the questions that won’t be asked in a university workshop. A question, for example, like why are you writing this poem? Why does this poem need to exist?

Shankar: Yes, what is at stake? What are you risking?

Pardlo: Exactly. What is the emotional background that this poem is rooted in? 

Shankar: Now explain to me one thing—how is Callaloo differentiated from Cave Canem? It’s my understanding that Callaloo has a more theoretical basis in some way so that the workshops are both for creative writers and critics. Do I have that right? 

Pardlo: Yes. We actually have a PhD student from Berlin who is tagging along. She’s not allowed to sit in on the workshops simply because of how intense and personal they get, but she’s researching some aspect of creative practice. We have this idea of inviting scholars from across the humanities, and finding a way to foster a multidimensional conversation focused at the site of literary production. But, anyway, back to your original question, I think we may be more craft oriented than Cave Canem for example. My sense of this might be off because of course, my last year of Cave Canem was in 2001, so it’s been a minute.

Shankar: When was your first year? 

Pardlo: 1998

Shankar: 1998? So that’s right at the beginning, around when Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady founded it, right? 

Pardlo: Yes, they started in 1996 and I think I didn’t get accepted in 1997? I know I  was waitlisted at one point. But yes, I was there really early. We met in the monastery outside of Poughkeepsie. But anyway, my sense of Cave Canem is that it is a community, an affirming community. It’s a place where poets who otherwise feel alienated or marginalized at home or at their home institutions where they are often one of the few—or indeed the only person of color in their university workshops can go to let that guard down. But at Callaloo we consider that guard a craft issue. This means we are more concerned with how the poet’s relationship to society, and to the world, shows up on the page, how it influences the poet’s imagination—the extent to which the poet chooses to reproduce those conditions on the page. The Callaloo workshop is not a very comforting environment in that regard, but it is intensely productive. 

Shankar: But it is primarily for writers of color? Or exclusively? 

Pardlo: It is not exclusively for black writers. In fact, we’ve had a number of Asian writers. We’ve had a few white writers attend as well. Of course, we’ve had plenty of Latino, Afro-Latino writers participating. I think philosophically this is because we want our participants to engage with ideological difference. We imagine our participants writing in a polycentric world, and with agency over even the most deeply inscribed narratives around identity. There are also a couple of public readings, a facilitator’s reading, and the participants read, and we are talking about adding academic, scholarly paper presentations in the future. 

Shankar: That’s great. I remember when I was in graduate school at Columbia in New York in the 1990s, around the same time as you, there were very few institutions, let alone communities that nurtured writers of color. I remember I used to go to the Asian American Writers Workshop back when they still met down in St. Mark’s, just to get some sense of kinship, to discover voices outside of the canon I was being taught in my MFA program. Kundiman wasn’t around then and I remember feeling the lack of exactly what you are talking about. In my university workshop, I was one of maybe two poets of color in my cohort and we really didn’t encounter any works outside the Western canon, and even then, it was highly skewed towards white male poets. We may have read Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden but those are the only poets of color I can remember being assigned by my professors. Of course, Junot Díaz has articulated these problems really perspicuously, and I only hope that the situation is shifting now. 

Pardlo: I think that is a big difference in what Callaloo does offer. I mean, we read broadly, and we welcome literary theory in the discussion. The kinds of poets we bring to the table are varied, but that’s because we have a different motivation behind diversity, a different interest and a different commitment to diversity than most universities have. I daresay we have a more catholic conception of diversity. And in terms of the theoretical constructs of identity that you are talking about, I think we interrogate identity in a way that a simple statement “I am a black writer” or “I am a white writer” reduces me to a two-dimensional concept. There’s no way that term can contain the breadth of my worldview and my sense of myself. And yes, it is a kind of shorthand that we use to trade between people in order to arrive at some brief and quick understanding of one another, but if the conception of myself that I bring to the page is merely that “I am an X writer,” then it could be that I am limiting myself or that I am acquiescing to the bureaucratic logic of the very institutions I would oppose. 

Shankar: So, do you have a similar kind of ambivalence outside of the writerly, in terms of your own identity politics? I’m thinking, of the hyphenated identity now. Being Asian American in some ways is delimiting, it can constrain what you can or cannot write about, it can push us towards exoticization, of propagating the kinds of immigrant narratives that the market has sanctioned as permissible for writers of color. And yet, the other side of the coin is that the identification helps you find community, and exposes you to other likeminded writers, which is all positive. 

Pardlo: So, here’s the thing. The world on the page is not the world outside. The rules that apply in our social world, and yes, we need community, whether hyphenated or not, these shorthands are very useful out in the world, but on the page, my imagination needn’t be delimited by a particular worldview or cultural imperative.

Shankar: Of course, your experience will be inflected by that perspective of being a person of color, but you’re saying that it doesn’t need to be overtly manifest. Not unless you want it to be. 

Pardlo: Exactly. So I think I want to separate out this very tired question of “are you a writer?” or “are you a black writer?” I think it’s a completely irrelevant question. On the page, I am everything. I am whatever my imagination hews towards.

Shankar: Which might be what has brought you towards the essay form. Because that is the perfect kind of capacious form to bring in everyone from Schopenhauer and Miles Davis, as you do. Your essays demonstrate the kind of diversity and vastness you are speaking about. 

Pardlo: Thanks. Yes, I agree that essay allows for a kind of introspective and cultural analysis and there’s an understanding that the contract between the writer and reader is different in the essay, such that the reader knows that “I am going to linger on ideas in a very different way that I am going to in a poem.” 

Shankar: Well, to be fair, your poems are pretty discursive and essayistic in nature. 

Pardlo: That’s true. 

Shankar: Which I love. I actually think that kind of philosophical poetry is not happening as much as it should. I love that you have a kind of metaphysical and inquisitive aspect to your work. Which doesn’t diminish the musicality or the lyrical fluency of your lines. When I was talking to fellow Providence writer Tina Cane about your work, I was telling her about the wisdom there and how there’s almost a neoclassical interest in human life and morality, which is not very fashionable. I think a lot of people go in trepidation of taking such a clear stance. 

Pardlo: Yes, I am aware that the readerly contract always has certain inborn expectations that we can work towards or against. When I say this is a poem, there are expectations that I am hoping to push against. I want necessarily to move the genre and move the reader’s expectation into some broader and newer territory. I am not at all interested in writing poems that could be referred to as conventional, though, of course, transcending convention is just an aspiration, not always achieved.

Shankar: Speaking of which, I was blown away when I read your Danish translations of the work of Niels Lyngsø. It’s so different than your own work. It’s almost Language poetry-esque, it’s playing with open field theory, caesuras and floating words. I saw somewhere you compared it to refrigerator magnet poetry. 

Pardlo: The challenge for me in those poems was finding the human subject. Of course, there is a human subject, but finding the feeling subject in this profoundly intellectual project that Niels was after. A highly theoretical project and so what is the emotional core of that work? And this is what is required of a translation, which is an empathy beyond the language after all. At least that’s what I believe. Word for word translations are crap. There has to be a deeper connection. 

Shankar: Remind me again of how you ended up in Denmark. Did you have a Fulbright scholarship out there? 

Pardlo: No, I didn’t go on a Fulbright. I actually just patched together my own study abroad program through Rutgers. I was at the New Brunswick campus at the time. 

Shankar: This was for your MFA? This is where you studied with Lisa Zeidner? 

Pardlo: No, this was undergrad. I actually have a very checkered collegiate history. I graduated high school in 1986, and immediately went to Rutgers in New Brunswick. Then I dropped out almost as quickly as I went in, so I was out by the second semester and I joined the Marine Corps Reserve. Came back to Rutgers only in 1989 and then met a Danish girl, and this is where I put together this study abroad plan to take some classes at the University of Copenhagen. 

Shankar: You lived with her in Copenhagen?

Pardlo: Yes, that’s right.

Shankar: And when did you help run the jazz club? Between all of this? 

Pardlo: My grandfather bought the jazz club in 1990, and she and I moved back to the States in 1991 to help run the club. And I did that throughout the 1990s but then in 1996, I finally went back to Rutgers in Camden to study. And at that point, I finally had decided that I wanted to be an English major and I wanted to be involved in poetry. That’s when I took this poetry workshop with Lisa Zeidner and that was it. 

Shankar: And she was your first real writing professor? 

Pardlo: Yes, and she gave me the idea that I could be a writer. I mean many of us have this kind of hero/mentor figure in our past, someone who helped facilitate our growth, and Lisa connected me with Painted Bride Quarterly, so I started reading slush for them, and they remain some of my closest friends. 

Shankar: That was when Major Jackson was reading for them?

Pardlo: Yes, Major was on the editorial board. Marrion Wrenn, Kathy Volk Miller, Daniel Nester were all part of it. 

Shankar: Those are my people! I actually think that’s when we first met at one of those late-night AWP hotel parties that the Painted Bride folks threw. 

Pardlo: That’s right! So that whole Philadelphia and Delaware-valley, Philly/Camden crew was centered around the Painted Bride Quarterly. 

Shankar: Interesting, I would have assumed that you would have normally gravitated towards New York City, but because of where you were located, Philadelphia was just as influential. 

Pardlo: Yes, that’s right and of course I’m going back to teach in Camden in the fall. There’s, I think, one other MFA program in the greater Philadelphia area, which is shocking to me. From the shore to the Poconos, Rutgers-Camden had very little competition among graduate creative writing programs.

Shankar: Doesn’t Penn have the Kelly Writers House—is that undergraduate?

Pardlo: Yes, that’s undergrad. So I am feeling a lot of entrepreneurial ambition around the program. It’s a great group. Pat Rosal is also there. 

Shankar: That’s different than Rutgers—Newark. I visited Rachel Hadas’s class there—she’s such a smart, engaged writer. When we were walking around campus, she was telling me that Newark is perennially the most diverse campus in the US. Is that the same in Camden? 

Pardlo: Not quite the same in Camden but we are working on it—which I recognize is banal thing to say. We do encourage cross-genre work, which is thrilling to me. It’s a pretty young program too, founded in the aughts. 

Shankar: That’s great. And I think the last time I saw Pat was also in Nicaragua where we were there together for the Granada International Poetry Festival. That was such an amazing experience. I should ask you what some of your takeaways were from being there? The reception of poetry—we know it is different in other parts of the world, but to feel that kind of passion emanating in all day festivals, everyone in the streets, young students to old matriarchs all thronging the plazas to hear poems. Pretty extraordinary. 

Pardlo: Yes, amazing. And I think there’s this kind of cultural regard for poets and poetry. Which we know and see in other places like Sri Lanka and in India of course. But what I was struck with even more was the connection between poetry and politics. The kind of institutionalized embrace of literature. So between Granada and what was that other big town?

Shankar: Managua?

Pardlo: I don’t think it was Managua. It was another colonial city where they compete with Granada?

Shankar: Oh yes, León. They were also doing a celebration of Ruben Dario, considered Nicaragua’s greatest poet and the progenitor of literary modernism, at the same time we were there. 

Pardlo: I was struck by this older gentlemen, I forget his name, and he was heavily involved in politics. He told me stories of going to DC in the early 1970s and unfortunately I’m shamefully ignorant of the political history of Nicaragua, but they wanted help from the US. 

Shankar: Oh yes, those were the Sandinistas who overthrew the dictator. You probably saw those photographs of those young revolutionaries dressed in military fatigues, waving those FSLN flags. In fact, our host Gioconda Belli fought with them even though she came from an upper class family and has this great memoir The Country Under My Skin about that experience. And you might have seen Ernesto Cardenal being honored on the first day? 

Pardlo: That’s right. 

Shankar: Yes Cardenal is a living a legend. A fine poet and primitivist artist, former Catholic priest who was famously defrocked by Pope John Paul II for supporting the revolution. He was kind of a cause célèbre for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others. 

Pardlo: He was the one who was surrounded the first day. 

Shankar: Exactly. He’s kind of the father of modern Nicaraguan literature, though a polarizing figure. And if you remember, his brother Fernando Cardenal died while we were over there. He was the education minister in Nicaragua for a long time and in fact, I heard that rate of literacy in Nicaragua increased exponentially under him. The Sandinistas went to all these remote villages to help teach reading and writing. 

Pardlo: Yes, and I found myself a little envious of that. This presumed relationship between literature and politics. It’s so important to have a literate population. Of course, the question of democracy is kind of up in the air there, but I think it’s shameful that they seem to value literacy and literature more than we do. It was really eye-opening, both Nicaragua as well as Sri Lanka, where I attended the Galle Literary Festival. It was really a growing period for me to begin thinking about my work in a more global context. I’m sensitive to (which may be to say I’m afraid of) provincialism in my work, and I constantly want to grow, to try to figure out how to take in larger swaths of humanity into my work. Going to Nicaragua and Sri Lanka made me realize that, holy shit, I’m nowhere near as cosmopolitan as I need to be.

Shankar: I wouldn’t call your work provincial by any stretch. 

Pardlo: Of course, I should be kinder to myself! But it was exciting and thrilling and intimidating and overwhelming, all together. 

Shankar: And of course, it was so brave to have your family with you. I was so impressed seeing you in Granada and how skillfully you navigated that line between the personal and professional. It’s nice I guess when you are so close to the beach and it’s warm. Your kids especially seem to be digging it. 

Pardlo: Yes, they had a lot of fun. And it gives them a chance to see me in my element. It’s funny, one of the young people who works at the festival, a volunteer, said to my kids, “You know your dad is famous. A very important man.” And my kids are like “yeah, right. I’m not buying that.” 

Shankar: Leave it to kids to put all in perspective. And how did it feel about hearing your work in Spanish? It was Francisco Larios who translated your poems, right? He translated Rae Armantrout and Susan Wheeler and a few of the others as well. 

Pardlo: Yes, Francisco translated it, and someone else recited it on stage. 

Shankar: How did that process of translation go? Did you have any input into it?

Pardlo: Not really. But that was more because of the time constraints. He wasn’t translating it for publication but for the festival. 

Shankar: Although, it sounds like he wants to do a huge anthology introducing the Spanish-speaking world to contemporary American poetry. 

Pardlo: Yes, so we probably will go back and forth a little more before that. I did have some edits for the young actor who was reading the poems. 

Shankar: Do you have any Spanish? A little bit? 

Pardlo: Yes, quite a bit. My wife’s background is El Salvadorian. 

Shankar: That’s right. I thought I heard you busting it out over there. But you wouldn’t feel comfortable translating your own work?

Pardlo: Given time, absolutely. But I’m far more interested in translating other people’s work. 

Shankar: That polyglot expression was one of the other remarkable things about the Granada Festival. I have too infrequently been exposed to so many languages. Consider there was that unforgettable Congolese poet Kamanda, and Daniel Boyac?o?lu, the Swedish poet who was rapping in lederhosen. I mean it was wild. 

Pardlo: One of the best things about the festival was meeting poets from all over the world. I think I told you I read in Finland and that was at the Annikki International Poetry Festival, which is about an hour north of Helsinki. And they have a dedicated poetry festival that is hugely attended, and there were a number of poets from around the world who were there as well. They had me reading with some jazz musicians. 

Shankar: Really?

Pardlo: It was odd. Interesting, but... 

Shankar: It’s so funny that you say that, because when I was recently in India, after the Jaipur Literary Festival, I went to Delhi and I don’t know if you know the poet, musician, and novelist Jeet Thayil? 

Pardlo: Yes, I met him in Sri Lanka. 

Shankar: Really terrific guy and a fine writer. He crystallizes the kind of seething druggy underworld of Bombay like no one else. Anyway, he ran this reading series at the Toddy Shop, and I read at its last iteration for the season. And he’s got a house band there who don’t rehearse with the poets before they get on stage, but as you start reading, they pick up the cadences and intonation of what you are reading and play along with you, but I actually found it a little disconcerting. Because you begin to subconsciously wonder if you should be responding to the music or vice versa. It was fun. Really cool, but unexpected. 

Pardlo: I know what you mean. I lost the signal between me and the audience. I couldn’t pick up my normal cues as to what extent I needed to slow down, to enunciate, what are they attending to? Because even when they are just still and staid and not doing the whole “hmm...aha!” thing, you can still feel how they are following and what they are responding to, but with the music, it drowns that out a little. 

Shankar: But did you feel that your experience in jazz clubs and listening to so much live music helped you in that situation? 

Pardlo: You would think, but no. Really, no! 

Shankar: Good to know!

Pardlo: I found myself overthinking. It becomes a collaboration. I’m not a poet reading with musicians accompanying me, but I am part of this group, and we are producing something together and that’s a very different project than me reading a poem to an audience. I mean, it was fun, I enjoyed it, but it was really different. 

Shankar: And how about Ireland? Poetry must be revered in Ireland?

Pardlo: That was the best part of my trip. I had a great time there. I just loved the people—I mean I romanticize Ireland. 

Shankar: You’re kind of a Joycean? A Samuel Beckett fan?

Pardlo: And Yeats. When I was an undergraduate, in 1998 actually, I took a literary tour. It was a class actually at Rutgers, and we took a tour of Ireland, and I met somebody in Dublin. I met a bunch of people, but this one guy came up to me and started having a conversation in the street. And he started making the correlations between the black power movement and 1916, and the troubles. Not just 1916, but all the way through. He knew as much about COINTELPRO and the black panthers and all of the figures involved in the movement as I did. I guess he was kind of showing off that he did know this stuff. 

Shankar: But still, the fact that he did. 

Pardlo: Yes, and just to make the correlations between Ireland and England, and African Americans and the larger US government were really deft. And certainly because of that, ever since then I’ve had a kind of identification with the Irish people. 

Shankar: And were you in Dublin?

Pardlo: This past trip? No, just in Listowel. And interestingly, the former editor of Soft Skull—

Shankar: Richard Nash?

Pardlo: Yes, Richard. I posted some photos from Listowel, and Richard responded and said you know I grew up in the town right next door. Then I found out that I had actually been right by his house. It was just one of those small world moments. I thought I was at some distant outpost, not urban by an stretch of the imagination.

Shankar: Ireland has always struck me the way Poland does. It’s amazing. You have these countries with small relative populations and yet these enormous literary figures arise from the culture somewhat disproportionately. Szymborska, Milosz, Zagajewski... it’s incredible. 

Pardlo: Right. That’s probably the next romantic location that I’ll fall in love with. 

Shankar: So right now, you’re working on both essays and poetry. Or is it primarily the essays?

Pardlo: Pretty exclusively the essays. 

Shankar: But that book is finished, right? Who’s your editor there?

Pardlo: Maria Goldverg. I think this is one of her first books at Knopf. She’d recently moved there from somewhere else. 

Shankar: Wow! Really? She’s the one who acquired it too? That’s exciting. And knowing your work, I find it telling that you gravitate in particular towards the essay form. I’ve loved the provisional aspect of the genre, even the etymological idea of trying, as in “essayer,” to make an attempt at something, but do you use hybrid, more supple lyric essay form at all? 

Pardlo: Some are more lyric than others. Some are more narrative. And similar to my poetry, I decided that in this one, the narrative is the spinal logic of this piece, so I am going to work most on getting the narrative straight. But if the piece is more nonlinear, digressive, discursive in nature, then it’s probably going to be more lyrical in form, so I tend to think about the essays with those framing mechanisms in mind. 

Shankar: My feeling is that as in your poetry, there’s an essential open, searching quality that has not predetermined where the reader might arrive, even as you use the classical modes of rhetoric and figuration to present your ideas. 

Pardlo: Right, they’re not closure-bound, there is no drive towards the “end.” The emphasis is all on the process, on the trying, which has its strengths and benefits. But the shortcomings are that it makes it very difficult to sell this kind of work to a popular culture. It’s not commercial enough. So some of the pushback I get—pushback is too strong a word—and actually I don’t get any pushback from Knopf, but I am very aware that more memoiristic and more narrative I make the thing, the easier it is for them to do their job and sell the book. 

Shankar: But maybe one way you are getting around this is by thinking about your nonfiction discretely, as essays? You are publishing them individually in different places, right? I know you published one of your first ones in Drunken Boat. But are you trying to publish the entirety of the collection? 

Pardlo: Well, yes, there are still some out, but now that the book is under contract, that’s not a priority. But if and when there is some interest in publishing them, I’m open to it. And yes, I think that there’s interest in most of them. 

Shankar: But does thinking of these separately affect your conception of the shape of the book? You were saying that these are all attempts, and not resolved or closed necessarily, but at the end of doing this collection, which is of course, is this introspective journey, do you feel that you had changed in some way, that you had unearthed some new facts or fossils? 

Pardlo: Yes, the writing process is always working on me—and I’m sure that this is true of any book—that the creative process transforms the self. Think of St. Augustine’s Confessions, you can see what a different person he has become, and the points where he’s grappling with these changes, where he doesn’t quite fit the principles he had thought to be true. So there’s a lot of room for that kind of ambiguity in the essay as I conceive of it. It allows for personal growth. And perhaps that’s where the essay is different from a lot of commercial writing where we expect to get a stable perspective, a sort of narrative written from a finite cultural point of view, whereas in the essay, the voice of the person telling the story gets to grow and to rethink. So maybe that’s one way to think about the difference in forms; the novel is a story that is already done and being told, whereas the essay is a story that is in process. 

Shankar: Right, so more inductive in some way. It makes me think of this essay collection by Zadie Smith I recently read, Changing My Mind, which is literally about how her perceptions and feelings about figures like Zora Neale Hurston change and evolve in time. Literally in the act of putting these thoughts and aesthetic perceptions down, her mind actually shifts and changes, which you have to allow to happen. 

Pardlo: Yes, that’s great. The writing is the thinking. 

Shankar: Where does that leave you now? Only fiction is left and you can be a true Renaissance man. Are you interested in writing stories or novels? 

Pardlo: I don’t think I’m going there. Well, never say never right? But I don’t think so. I’m not attracted to it as a writer. 

Shankar: Or screenplays? 

Pardlo: That, yes, I’m absolutely interested in. Plays, theater. Yes, I’m absolutely interested in theater which feels an exciting form to experiment with. In fact, an old friend of mine, Thomas Bradshaw is a playwright who teaches at Northwestern—we worked together at Medgar Evers College, and I got to see a number of his plays and he does some really offensive things in his plays but again discomfort is meant to be part of the frame. I mean each time I have gone to see one of his plays, whether it was a staged reading or an actual, full-on production, people got up and left. 

Shankar: Really? Right in the middle of the performance?

Pardlo: Yes, and that in itself was fascinating to me. 

Shankar: So tell me. I’m not that familiar with his work. What is the shocking content? 

Pardlo: Well... I’m even uncomfortable describing it. It has to do with race and sexuality. One of the things I appreciate about his work is how he identifies the fault lines, how he identifies the exposed nerves in our culture. And it aggravates the observers because he puts his finger into it. And not for gratuitous reasons, not just to garner attention—and I’m thinking now about some of the arguments against Vanessa Place or Kenny Goldsmith or whoever. But to be able to do that and to create a framework in which the aggravating of the nerve can be done and thought about in nuanced ways. It is a kind of way of walling off the screaming reactionary hordes and creating a space for the communal experience of thinking through.

Shankar: So a kind laboratory for the taboo.

Pardlo: That’s fantastic! A laboratory for the taboo. Yes, that’s exactly it. Thank you, that’s great. 

Shankar: You didn’t walk out but did you feel like you had to avert your eyes when you watched his plays? 

Pardlo: Well, it takes a lot to shock me... and he shocks me! I mean no I’m not going to look away, I mean I’m fascinated by my own resistance. I mean comedians do this too, right? Making the outrageous statement and then doubling back and creating a context in which it’s ok, you can get away with it. 

Shankar: Comedy has great cathartic power in that way. I think it actually helps us grieve. When we reach that shared point where we can stomach tragedy, it’s generally when someone can make a joke or laugh in some way. That’s kind of the point at which trauma is able to be processed and collectively digested. I think comedians actually are pioneers in that sense, because they go into those dark places and speak their mind freely often before the rest of us are ready to do so. I think theater does this too. 

But let’s get back to your book of essays, Air Traffic. I love how, on top of the kind of ominous connotations we associate with living in a post-9/11 surveillance state, the phrase evokes those unseen attitudes and perpetual judgements that are always teeming between us. A gridlock of thoughts. And this is a collection of essays, but is there a through thread or arc that it follows?

Pardlo: Yes, it actually started out as a memoir. A pretty conventional memoir. There’s that word again, conventional. And I was very comfortable with it, and I wanted to know what else I can do, what else I could do with form, and that’s why I went to Columbia for the second MFA and in the process of studying there and working with Philip Lopate, it broke it up into essays. Because there is that original kind of memoir arc in the background of the essays, they have a sense of cohesion. 

Shankar: That skeletal structure is still there? 

Pardlo: Exactly. And the pieces are more or less biographical, chronological.

Shankar: So, you write about your childhood? You grew up in Willingboro, Jersey, which was one of the original Levittowns, right? 

Pardlo: It was one of three full-scale Levittowns in America. There was obviously Levittown, Long Island, Levittown, Pennsylvania, and I forget for what reason we couldn’t be named Levittown. But we were named Willingboro. 

Shankar: Did it have the same kind of racial dynamics, and the influx of gentrification and the exodus and all of that? 

Pardlo: It’s a fascinating story. So the other two are kind of working class white and began as that and have kind of stayed as that. Willingboro began as a kind of middle-class utopia, this land of picket fences and upwardly mobile families and in ground swimming pools, and it is now probably at least eighty-percent black. And typically, places like that only become majority black by white folks leaving. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, and there are lots of reasons, but in the 1980s to the end of, until today—I think it continues—people, white families, and plenty of black families too, moved out of Wililngboro into Cherry Hill, Morristown, the surrounding areas, and the school districts there were left with few resources. There is even some worry from time to time that the state is going to take over. The tax base is a fraction of what it was when I was growing up there. 

But it’s an interesting social study in the mass movements of people. At the same time that we have this flight out of Willingboro, we have the gentrification of urban areas. And so in the essay collection I quote the sociologist Herbert Gans. The gist of what he says is that the people now leaving suburban America are today’s gentrifiers. So the kids who escape the burbs are the new urban colonizers. And of course I live in Bed Stuy now, which means I’m a gentrifier. Is there a little guilt involved in that? Maybe? We bought our house in 2005 when the neighborhood was still rough around the edges, so to say the least. And it’s a poodle now.

Shankar: Really?

Pardlo: Yes. The joke I like to tell is that it is no longer, Bed Stuy do or die, but Bed Stuy eeh, well, ok. I might get it done. It’s not that urgent. 

Shankar: What would the Notorious B.I.G. think? 

Pardlo: But it’s interesting watching these radical changes in the makeup and culture of communities and how communities view themselves. The identity that communities claim for themselves. That’s a through line in the essays. I’m interested in gentrification, it’s a fascinating process and I’m looking for a way into it that’s not the same old narrative. 

Shankar: And do your kids go to public school there?

Pardlo: No. That was never a question. They couldn’t go to school in Bed Stuy. As liberal and progressive as my wife and I are—or at least like to think we are—I don’t trust my kids’ physical safety in the public schools in Bed Stuy. Not so ironically, they go to a private school on the Upper East Side. And it’s a haul getting them to school every day and back, but these are the things you do. 

My wife grew up in Bushwick in the 1970s and also went to Dalton, a famous Upper East Side private school. But she has a very strong sense of what it means to exist in a threatening environment and what is necessary to navigate those environments.

Me... not so much! I take her word for how rough it can be. 

Shankar: Your poet street cred can’t help you there? 

Pardlo: Unfortunately, no. 

Shankar: I think the other thing I remember we spoke about last time had to do with AWP. Did you go to AWP in LA? I couldn’t go because that’s when I was in Vietnam.

Pardlo: Yes, I did. 

Shankar: But we spoke a little about this controversy that surrounded Vanessa Place and how there was this calling for her resignation from the AWP’s panel-selection committee, in part because she has this project where she appropriates passages from Gone with the Wind and tweets them out, particularly some of the more racially disturbing excerpts, and her Twitter photo was of Hattie MacDonald as Mammy and it created this huge brouhaha. 

Pardlo: That’s right. 

Shankar: And there was this sudden online poll to have her removed that got thousands of signatures in a matter of hours. And we at Drunken Boat were implicated in some way because we had published some of her early work from this project as conceptual fiction. I felt like that was such a missed opportunity for genuine dialogue there. But there wasn’t any room for nuance in the discussion. There was just this reflexive condemnation. 

So, we actually opened up our blog at Drunken Boat to have a more authentic discussion about race under the hashtag #whoseplace? Because really whose place is it to police these areas? But how do you feel about this? I feel like the last few years in particular there has been a lot of charged and good work surrounding poetics and race. 

Pardlo: There’s been a lot of good work about race and poetics? What do you have in mind when you say that?

Shankar: Well let’s just say that the groundwork is being paved for a conversation that hasn’t happened before. There’s an anthology like Laura McCullough’s “A Sense of Regard,” out with University of Georgia Press, which has some really compelling essays about this question. 

Pardlo: Oh, wow. I’m sorry I don’t know that book.

Shankar: I’ll send you a link to it. But there’s also I feel a kind of establishment resistance to the idea of the Academy opening its doors to more diverse voices. Someone like Marjorie Perloff would dismiss something like the Mongrel Coalition out of hand. And Kenny Goldsmith was also embroiled in controversy when he remixed the Michael Brown autopsy report as poetry. What do you think about all of this? 

Pardlo: Those examples are inflammatory and they are intended to be inflammatory. And myself? I don’t like to take the bait. And as you said, a lot of the response has been reactionary and continue to be so, and there isn’t room for nuance and because of that, I stay disengaged. I’m not one to shout over the din. So, I tend to take a back seat and do my own homework off to the side on what’s happening. Which is to say that one risks making a target of oneself simply by looking for nuance in these conversations. 

As soon as you say, well maybe there’s another way to think about this, it’s over. Because there’s one line of logic, there’s right and there’s wrong and there is no gray area, and the suggestion that there’s a gray area means you are on the wrong side. So, I tend not to step into fray. But I am extremely fascinated by the gray areas. And I’m most fascinated by things like the Best American Poetry controversy. You remember the poet, I can’t think of his name.

Shankar: You mean either of his names?

Pardlo: Right, either of his names! So I am really interested in the ways identity is a form and can be used as a poetic form. To go back to the kinds of questions we are asking at Callaloo, I want to separate out the social world—or at least test to what extent you can separate out—the lived world from the world I am creating on the page through the creative process. I would grant—and here’s the dangerous statement, right?—for the sake

of experiment in my drafting process, at home where no one else can see me, I would grant myself the possibility to write in the voice of my literary heroes, for example. And I have certainly experimented with cultural expressions from traditions other than African American, traditions from around the world.

Shankar: But you are talking more formally, than in terms of voice. Have you written a poem from an explicitly white perspective, for example, or attempted to inhabit character by making such a leap? 

Pardlo: Yes, of course. The so called “white voice” is the voice that we are all trained and raised in—if only by virtue of being surrounded by it in the media we consume. It’s the voice of authority, right? So I am already code-switching, the subordinate or alternate voice is one of home, of familiarity. I’m already operating in the authorized, sanitized idiom. What are the idioms, the cultural world views and value systems that might inform or even screw with that authorial voice. What does it mean, for example, to view family in the way that my wife views family, which is that family is the entire extended group?

Shankar: The cosmos of the second cousins of the uncle of your great grandniece and their progeny. Very Indian in fact. 

Pardlo: Yes, and there’s no hierarchy in terms of mom, dad, brother, sister, that’s it, and everybody else is, well, we’ll get to you later. The way my wife views family everybody is on the same footing and anyone can show up to sleep at your house. Likewise, the door is always open. It’s fully reciprocal. That kind of family. So what does it mean to bring that sense of family to my yankee, individualistic cultural context? What sparks might come out of that? So, it’s not just form—I mean it’s always forms, but in this case, it is ideological forms, and so the question for me is how do I construct a subject on the page that avails itself of many world views, many historically constructed value system without privileging any one, or even a subject that questions the way certain views are privileged, and disempower and alienate others. So that’s a kind of undercurrent of thought I like in dealing with this complexity.

Shankar: It’s so interesting that gray area that you talked about before, it’s really fertile territory, but also as a professor you’ve probably found that certain subjects are off-limits, even when academia is where there should be room for questioning and ambiguity, for having our prevailing perspectives challenged in some way, but exceedingly it seems that conversation is being restricted. You have “trigger warnings” and I know I have learned over the years what I will say and won’t say in the classroom, and I wonder if that contributes to our monochromatic sensibility which doesn’t leave room for complexity and dissent. Are you able to bring that gray area into the classroom?

Pardlo: No and I guess I’m not interested. That’s why I love leading these workshops at Callaloo, because we can engage these questions, but I don’t feel safe doing that kind of work in a university classroom. Just like I am describing how I don’t want to go into the colosseum where everyone is battling it out but would rather sit in the bleachers and think about how this fight is playing out. In a university, people have careers at stake, too, so it’s not just in the classroom, it’s the whole structure. So to say could we rethink the place of African American literature in the English department? Could we rethink the centering of Shakespeare in the core of the major? Can we empower students to choose among a variety of literatures, of Englishes. But people get very possessive and defensive, and reason shuts down and there is no conversation. Donald Trump takes over. 

Shankar: I hear you. This is all interconnected in my mind. I’m thinking about the devolution of civic discourse, how it’s just become people shouting at each other from one side or another, and I wonder if there’s something endemic to late industrial capitalism that engenders this. Is it a byproduct of a consumption society? Looking at historical records, I don’t think we are romanticizing the past to believe there was more reasoned discourse taking place for the select few in many former civilizations, but one of the great blessings—and curses—of democracy is that it opens up this discussion to the masses, which often means communication is often targeted at the least common denominator. 

Pardlo: We are constructed as consumers almost from birth, so it’s part of our socialization, our acculturation. It has everything to do with marketing. It’s easier to sell people stuff when we are taught what to value.

Shankar: There’s probably an element of mob mentality that the drive towards conformity partakes of as well. I’m going to call out any difference, because I want to be on the right side of normative behavior, and not be target myself. Sometimes the most vicious, spurious, Puritanical, and close-minded vitriol comes from the very people who pride themselves on being open-minded, liberal, and “inclusive.” 

Pardlo: Yes power. Safety. We want to be protected. We are an insecure society. 

Shankar: I think what bothers me when we have these literary brouhahas that we’ve been discussing, and as important as it is—and of course it is crucial that more writers of color are published in prominent magazines and hold tenure-track positions—but I think about how indignant people get about these things and then I consider some of the larger social problems we have and I wonder why we are not in the streets protesting the facts of mass incarceration or the inequality in pay for the genders, for example. It feels we are more prone to get agitated about something relatively small, which deflects us from concentrating on mobilizing larger social change. And this taps into the neurosis of the moment, how we are taught to derive a pleasure from feeling miffed or disgruntled that shuts down dialogue. Talk radio syndrome. 

Pardlo: There’s a through line that connects institutionalized racism, patriarchy, and rape culture. Once you start talking about how all of these things are interconnected, I think peoples’ eyes start to glaze as well. They want to talk about their constituency instead. 

Shankar: How do you talk about it? That’s the challenge. I lived in Connecticut for a long time and it’s a resolutely blue state. Folks vote Democratic and are mighty pleased that they do. But when you scratch the surface, you realize that the Nutmeg State has more inequality of wealth within a similarly sized area than anywhere else in the world. The richest neighborhood in the world is likely the Round Hill neighborhood in Greenwich, but you drive an hour in either direction to the inner city of Bridgeport or Hartford, and half of the population lives below the poverty line. And guess what? Shouldn’t come as any surprise that they are demographically disproportionately Hispanic and African American. But you can’t have that conversation in Connecticut, because everyone is already liberal. 

Pardlo: That’s the thing. You can be very progressive and manage to be very monocentric at the same time. I also believe that as long as we continue to think about race as an exclusively physical property, we are not seeing the ways in which race is a commodity and a social currency. As I said, we Americans are acculturated through media to view the world from the privileged position of whiteness and that has implications on the self-image of people who don’t get to exercise that privilege.

Shankar: The challenge, then, might be to find a kind of nonprivileged language of difference that we can use to illuminate rather than to obscure. 

Pardlo: Absolutely. That’s a large part of my literary project. 

Shankar: Do you sense that our poetics have become, communally, more inclusive? That the landscape has begun to permanently shift? I was just thinking the other day of Carolyn Kizer and Maxine Kumin resigning as chancellors of the Academy of American Poets to protest the absence of poets of color on the board. You remember that? I think that was back in 1998. And I wonder if you feel like that from that point onwards there has been some kind of cultural shift, that there’s greater attention, even if not enough, being paid to a more heterogenous array of writers? 

Pardlo: So, the fundamental question is one of empathy, of being able to see the world—and being open to seeing the world—through the fears, ambitions, anxieties, and hopes of someone who doesn’t share my privilege or perspective. 

Shankar: Agreed. I think that’s just a fundamental lesson in being human. I actually think it’s really useful for everyone to be part of a marginalized community at some point in their lives. I mean go somewhere where you are out of your element, where you are the other, where everyone speaks a different language than you do. 

Pardlo: Where you can’t rely on that privilege. Then it becomes visible. Then you can see it and you might begin to understand what it feels like to be a person of color in America. 

Shankar: Empathy. It’s perhaps the secret to healing the divisions in our country. And in some ways literature is a vanguard for society at large, so creating the space for to this kind of discussion can have a pretty profound residual effect. But having an honest conversation about race seems so problematic. I don’t know if we will ever fully ever get there. 

Pardlo: I always remain hopeful that literature is a way to subtly introduce these issues.

 

Ravi Shankar is founding editor of Drunken Boat and the author, editor, and publisher of over a dozen books, including The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, Tamil translations of a 9^th-century Tamil poet/saint, The Autobiography of a Goddess, and What Else Could it Be: Ekphrastics and Collaborations. He teaches for the New York Writers Workshop and has a research fellowship from the University of Sydney.

EXCERPT

Excerpt from Air Traffic

Behind the Wheel

No one has offered any suggestions, with the car—my mother-in-law in the backseat between the girls—feeling fuller than normal. So I’ve taken charge and made an executive decision about the remainder of our Mother’s Day itinerary. I’ve decided, too, there is no need to prepare this Get-Along Gang for where we are going by sharing our destination with them. And yet, my wife Ginger asks why I am taking DeKalb when it always clogs up where they put in the new bike lanes. She thinks she knows where I’m going. Because it is a nearly room temperature evening, she thinks I must want to find a sidewalk café in Fort Greene where we can sit and be seen and people-watch. So she thinks. And, OK, she’s right—I do. But I don’t want her to know she is right, so now I have to think of something else and act like it was always my intention to go to that other place.

“Would have been faster to keep going down Marcy to Myrtle,” Ginger says, facing her window.

Fita, considers her car seat more of a recliner than eggcup and uses the shoulders of Ginger’s seat in front of her as an ottoman. Sara, at seven, already affecting a pre-teen ennui, leans forward on her booster as if it were the perch on a dunk tank. Let’s get this over with, her attitude seems to say. Granny sits between them, prim as a governess. I am driving through Bed Stuy, with its intermittent construction sites dotting the landscape like those first fat little grapes of rain on a windshield. The neighborhood is “in transition,” we say, as is often said of the dying. Each year more people walking dogs, more people riding skateboards. Fewer and fewer police helicopters with klieg lights searching the ground like UFO abduction beams. More and more yellow cabs (as opposed to the green cabs native to Brooklyn and Queens) conducting their only licit business this side of the East River: dropping off fares from Manhattan. We’ve spent the day at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, but the weather is so nice no one’s ready to go home. And so, continuing down Marcy, past our street, Quincy, I have made a left, triggering Ginger’s objection, onto DeKalb.

“Why do you always offer traffic advice in the conditional past tense?” I say. “It’s like you wait until I do something so you can call it a mistake. You know what would have been faster? It would have been faster if we all had jet packs. It would have been faster if we had stayed home.” Ginger dismisses me, turning that invisible key in the lock that seals her lips, and tossing it clear out the window.

From the book Air Traffic by Gregory Pardlo, copyright 2018 by Gregory Pardlo.
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.