Sze-Lorrain: In the first chapter of your latest book of prose, The Education of a Young Poet, you write:
Perhaps the hardest thing about my education as a poet is watching the past reverse itself. It’s like undressing. First you remove the jacket, then the shirt, the undershirt, and then you stand bare-chested in the cold air. Then you step out of the trousers but no underwear or socks. Memory torments you like that. And when memory looks down the street of a small Christian town in America before dawn with the eyes of a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy who is standing half-dressed on the porch, and the stars grin at the secrets of the world, memory zips up its pants against the wind and carries on.
Do you consider The Education of a Young Poet a “memoir” of sorts? Why a memoir at this point in your life?
Biespiel: Yes. Emphasis on “of sorts.” Maybe it’s an impersonation of a memoir. That’s a poet’s corner of the world, isn’t it? The book is a poem impersonating a memoir. A lyric autobiography. Narrowly tailored to the question, “How’d you become a writer?”
The history I tell is framed to answer that question; concocted out of the actual events of my life, and those who came before me, like my great-grandfather and grandfather and parents; facts imagined as facts; a disguise of real events; or real dramatizations of the disguises, the masquerades of life. Something gets abandoned in the process, and the very act of that abandonment is accepting the distortions of memory. Not as metaphor-making, as in a poem, but as a mirror of the masks that one has donned in real life. A study as dramatization and interpretation. I suppose, because I was less interested in the potentiality of metaphor, the realm of prose narrative memoir offered itself to me as a simpler route.
Sze-Lorrain: How much of this lyrical-cum-autobiographical writing is betrayed by memory, and how much memory is being betrayed by poetry?
Biespiel: I’ve written about memory many times over the years and have seldom, for better or for worse, veered far from the premise that memory is a version of events based, usually, but not always, on the emotional perspectives one has in the moment of remembering. I’m of the opinion, again, for better or for worse, that memory is, when it’s dealt with sincerely, not so much a deception or betrayal, a duplicity, or even a let-down, but a devotion, a frankness to the emotional tethers. More so than to the past events, the so-called truth. That’s why memories are dynamic. One’s emotional take on them shifts, and with those shifts come new arrangements of images, sequences, narratives, interpretations, insights, maybe even wisdom. I’m in my mid-fifties. To a degree, I was trying to re-enact some of the adventures of my youth, adventures that seeded the decades that followed. Re-enactment is the thing poems have a stake in. As in: (Narrator’s Voice): “in the performance of this poem, the part of the poet will be played by the current poet’s memory of his former self.” Not so much a betrayal, by that approach, as it is, one ought to admit, a melodrama, rescued, to a degree, by the ways a poet finds, forges, and fashions metaphor into a poem.
Sze-Lorrain: The book begins and ends with a chapter about your grandfather Joe. Can you tell us why it is important that you identify with your grandfather, and how this has played a revealing role in structuring—or anchoring—the narrative[s] of your book?
Biespiel: A small clarification, if I may. I apologize. The book opens with the chapter called “Elma” with my great-grandfather, Harry, immigrating in 1910 from the Pale of Settlement to the United States, followed, in the same chapter, by his son (my grandfather), Joe, arriving in America ten years later as a thirteen year-old boy. Harry is the rag-peddler. Joe is the teenage boy who, Chagall-like, “flies” inside the house. It’s a dramatization of an heirloom memory—Harry’s arrival in America is part of the Genesis story of my family, told and retold over the decades. The Joe in that chapter is also imagined, a figment of the memory, and therefore, as likely as anything else, a true characterization.
The book closes around 1987 with the chapter called “The Suit.” The man in that chapter is my grandfather, Joe. I knew my great-grandfather (Harry) until I was twelve years old. I knew my grandfather (Joe) until I was forty years old. There are many parallels between the two chapters, “Elma” and “The Suit” that open and close the book. I’ll speak to one: the master and apprentice motif. The great-grandfather of chapter one being imagined into life by the “attending” great-grandson who is a writer reimagining his roots. The grandfather in the last chapter, on the other hand, is present, alive, full-blooded, and so is the grandson at the onset of his writing life. I suppose there are various ways to interpret the gift of the suit. One may be as an offering, a guise: take this suit and become the poet.
Sze-Lorrain: Halfway in the book, you share about your competitive diving life during the mid-eighties, and how writing first found its way to you as an embodied act and experience. You compare the “sensation” of writing to the “physics” of the sport—for instance, when you describe your secret ritual of writing letters to Whitney, your then-girlfriend in Boston:
[. . . ] I began to write the daily letters with more secrecy. They were too erotic to speak of, the physical act of the writing of them I mean. When I inserted myself into the process of writing it was like I was cat crawling into the sentences and paragraphs. A similar sensation was happening to me when I was diving, too. When I’d be underwater after a dive, I could feel the air in my lungs build pressure, just as at night in my rented room I could feel the words in me build pressure. Kicking underneath the water in the deep end of the pool after a dive and before I’d swim back up to the surface, I felt as if I were haunting a maze of night and dreams.
And toward the end of this chapter “From the Earth to the Stars,” you affirm:
Even then I knew writing was next. When that decision to reorient my life came a few months later, I determined to use my years as a diver as a peculiar sort of model for literary life—for training, for discipline, and for patience.
Is writing [still] a “sport” for you? Do you [or have you ever] approach[ed] it as some form of competition, as you did with diving? If so, how? [Why the opening quotation of Jasper Johns about “failure,” the binary of “success”?]
Biespiel: Athletes, and I suppose musicians, any artist or writer really, understand that the majority of the time one is doing a sport or working in an art you are practicing. So much time spent in (the list is long!): preparation, education, groundwork, planning, preparedness, rehearsal, study, training, alertness, anticipation, expectation, foundation- building, gestation, homework, workout, incubation. The actual performance or formal competition is brief, by contrast. Performance. Formal. The root and word “form” stands out, doesn’t it?
To steer closer to your question, I’d say a poet is in competition, figuratively speaking, with the form or forms at hand above all else. Again, the list is long . . . in competition with the potential of form, design, pattern, model, structure, articulation, figuration, contour, embodiment. Of course, I’m purposefully ignoring the B-side of your question, the natural hazard of competition between poets—people are people after all; the culture of competition in poetry, as in the contests, the prizes, the awards, the judges. I wasn’t alluding to that aspect of the poetry business at all. But to the other: the implicit competition with one’s self and one’s limitations; the intrinsic competition to strive and tackle, contend and labor, shoot for, make every effort. And, finally, the transference of orienting one’s life from one overriding attention (competitive diving) to another (writing poems).
Sze-Lorrain: Here, you cite from Wordsworth’s The Two-Part Prelude and Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” among others. You read Stanley Plumly’s Out-of-the-Body Travel, Robert Bly’s Silence in the Snowy Fields, et cetera. You mention Montale, Neruda, Juan Ramón Jiménez . . . In what ways has your reading life evolved in these recent years, and in particular since the completion of The Education of a Young Poet?
Biespiel: Mostly since the completion of writing the book I’ve been working on two manuscripts. The first, due out next spring, is a new book of poems. Really, one poem, in 54 parts, called Republic Cafe. The book owes something, in the cut and mold to Transformer’s Baltics and Amichai’s Time, as well as to the French film, Hiroshima mon amour. I’ve also been writing something of a prequel to The Education of a Young Poet, something of a more direct, traditional memoir, about why I left Texas in the first place. I suppose, I’m a poet who, for the time being, is an accidental memoirist. Or not. I’ve been interested in writing autobiographically—even in Wild Civility, my second book of poems, which was made of dramatic monologues—all along. To write the memoir I speak of I’ve read a lot of Eudora Welty. Her dramatic framing is wonderfully exciting to me. And it’s been helpful to think through my own narrative through studying her prowess.
Sze-Lorrain: What are some challenges that you had encountered during the writing of this “intimate recollection”?
Biespiel: One concern I had, all along, was not tying the knot between anecdote and lesson- learned too tightly, too neatly. Did those events really teach me those lessons? Or is my recollecting them understanding what they meant to me, and therefore the lesson comes in, and through, recollection. I don’t think I dwelt on the differences much.
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Photo credit: Spencer Reece
David Biespiel is the author of ten books, most recently The Education of a Young Poet, A Long High Whistle, and Charming Gardeners. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan, and Stegner fellowships, two Oregon Book Awards, and been a National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award finalist. A contributor to American Poetry Review, Poetry, New York Times, New Republic, Politico, Slate, and the Rumpus, he is a poet-in-residence at Oregon State University and president of the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters. His eleventh book, Republic Café, is due out next year.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator, and zheng harpist who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. Her most recent book of poetry The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and one of Library Journal’s “Best Books: Poetry.” Her work has also been shortlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award and longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She lives in Paris.