Combining the poetic, photographic and historic, Andrew Seguin’s collection The Room In Which I Work (winner of the 2015 Omnidawn Open Book Contest) is immersive on a variety of different levels; it offers its reader three unique prisms of illumination. I recently asked Seguin about how he came to write The Room In Which I Work, the commonalities (both distinct and indistinct) that poetry and photography share, and how external politics fits into his artistic work.
I’m curious what the gestation process for The Room In Which I Work was—when were the first poems drafted and when were the last ones completed? And is poetry more a part of your life when the manuscript was first started or now? Further, as you’ve grown up how have you accepted or neglected the role of “contemporary artist?” Does art (poetry/photography) still matter as much to you as it once did, or is it less important than finding a good job, getting a raise, finding love or staying in it, home-life, community-life, etc.?
I wrote The Room In Which I Work in about one year, the year of 2014. That neat time frame is because I had been awarded a Fulbright fellowship to France to work on the book, and I began the ten-month grant in January 2014. I wrote the earliest poem in the book that month, and the last, if I recall correctly, in September 2014, shortly before I returned to the US (and just to clarify, the placement of the poems in the book is not chronological). Because many of the poems are tied to research I was doing in France, or specific places and atmospheres there, I felt a window had closed when I got back in New York. After that point, I was primarily revising the manuscript, which had its structure in place. But I do recall rewriting and revising some of the first section, “Histories,” in late 2014 and early 2015 while back in New York.
Poetry holds the same position in my life as it did then—a prime one. I am always writing new poems, and trying to forge a way forward through them, with them. The difference is that in 2014 I was lucky enough to have made my job writing poems; the Fulbright grant really afforded me ten months to focus, primarily, on writing a book. Now, like most people, I have a full-time job and a full-time life, but writing and reading poetry are a full-time part of it. Poetry, and art, are fundamental to me, as is my marriage, cooking good meals, seeing great movies, traveling—they are all part of what makes life worth living.
There’s a 1965 lecture in The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer entitled “Poetry and Politics” that debates those exact three words, their role and place or lack thereof. In an introductory preface to the lecture the volume’s editor, Peter Gizzi, writes:
Spicer asserts that writing poetry does not absolve one of the political responsibility, but if one expects to use poetry as a vehicle for political activism, it is likely to be bad poetry. He is not against political action; on the contrary, he suggests that instead of writing a bad political poem one should write a letter to one’s congressman. This suggestion is not dismissive. Spicer himself wrote a number of such letters in his life, one of them to the San Francisco Chronicle protesting its racist coverage of the Vietnam War, which recounted overwhelming losses among the Viet Cong less sympathetically than much smaller losses among American troops.
Fifty-three years later, I’m curious about your own take on this. I read The Room In Which I Work as a book largely devoid of politics—or at least external politics; certainly there’s an internal politicking that’s regularly occurring from poem to poem. But maybe I’m off-base. Post the election of the 45th President of the United States, with so much of cultural/artistic life crossing over (explicitly or implicitly) into political life, do you yourself feel the need as a poet to be “political” in your work? To address current political issues in your poetry (or photography) in some way, shape or form?
I haven’t read or listened to that Spicer lecture, but I agree with his idea as reported by Peter Gizzi—that treating a poem as a vehicle for political activism is likely not a winning strategy for the poem. My instinct is that it’s likely not a long-term one for the activism, either, although since the election of Donald Trump, many people have turned to poetry for a voice of resistance, and volumes such as Resist Much Obey Little have been published and sold in support of Planned Parenthood, for example. So poetry is helping people engage civically in our moment, and that engagement is crucial. That said, I don’t feel an obligation to be political in my work, if “political” in this context means directly confronting in my poems the policies of the Trump administration, policies which I am opposed to. To do that, I have written letters to Congress, voted, marched, supported the ACLU and other nonprofits doing work I believe in. Yet as someone who is alive enough to the world to want to write poems about it, and in so doing be as sensitive to the immense range of human experience as I can, political issues, or the effects and language of them, can’t not get into the poems. Because these issues are the facts of life, and life is one’s material. There’s been a lot of dark material this year, and it continues to gain mass, and that weight is in some of the poems I’ve been writing. I can think of two recent poems I wrote that were responses, in part, to the deep political divide I feel exists in this country, but I’m not sure a reader, encountering them, would sense that source. Nor is that divide strictly what the poems are about. But such issues are there, obliquely rather than directly or confrontationally, because that is just how my imagination works.
Would you care to haiku your own poetics/ what you’re trying to do or get to with your work in The Room In Which I Work?
I would say it was twofold: to imagine for Nicéphore Niépce a voice, or voices; and to rub biography and documentary against lyric poetry and see what came of the friction. I was also wanting to experiment and challenge myself: what kind of poems would I write in writing about a historical figure? I was hoping to grow.
Hand in hand with that voice and those voices, dialogue and the dialogic is obviously omnipresent in The Room In Which I Work. Fundamentally this dialogue consists of the book’s speaker conversing directly and indirectly with the ghost of Nicéphore Niépce, but there’s also a dialogue with the past vis-à-vis the present, with current technology and the outmoded kind that the current is often still beholden to. In the very first poem in the book you further outline how, just like a word or a book, the nature of a photo is constantly shifting, never static or fixed. I’m curious how you might explain the connection between poetry and photography to someone who has never really thought about it. As both a poet and photographer, the inherent dialogue between the two art forms resides, in your opinion, where exactly?
A good place to begin might be the word “photography,” the etymology of which readers of this blog likely already know: the Greek for “light” and “writing.” Niépce called his work “héliographie,” or “sunwriting.” From photography’s earliest days, its inventors were thinking of it in relationship to writing. They saw it as a kind of inscribing, with the sun being both pen and ink. A means of recording. And in trying to name it, they also turned to other art forms, painting and lithography, in particular. Niépce often referred to “allowing objects to paint themselves in the camera obscura.” There is a wonderful letter between Daguerre and Niépce in which they are trying out numerous combinations of prefixes and suffixes to arrive at a compound word to describe what it is they are doing—one idea was “Physautographie,” or “Nature describing itself.” But we now talk about the medium in a broad sense as photography, and it is Sir John Herschel, a British astronomer, inventor and scholar who is primarily credited with coming up with that term, although a Frenchman in Brazil named Hércules Florence can also be credited with having done so earlier. So from the medium’s inception there is this struggle with naming, and with sufficiently capturing the process in language. Any poet can relate to that. And that is one level on which I’ve found it fruitful to think about the relationship between poetry and photography, especially in The Room In Which I Work.
But that doesn’t get into the qualities a photograph might share with a poem, and vice versa. A photograph can be seen as a temporally minute slice of the world, which by virtue of its abbreviation gains power to communicate thought and feeling far beyond its borders. An image made 60 years ago at 1/60th of a second can today feel ongoing, in present tense. I think a poem can operate in a similar fashion. Heightened language can create a density that is expansive.
There is also one very basic connection between the mediums, and that is image. Photographs are images of course, while poetry creates images out of language. My feeling is that each medium’s production of them tends more toward the evocative than the narrative. Because of the way a camera frames the world, isolating a part of it, re-contextualizing it, there is a fragmentary nature to the photograph. I think a poetic image has a similar quality, being not explicative but atmospheric, glancing, a part of a whole. And in each medium, the sequencing of images that may be disparate, from different times and places, can accrete to a unified whole.
On the other hand, some poetic images, and poems, aim to be documentary—a recording, in words, of what the poet sees. And that is how the camera behaves; it records what’s in front of it. But in each case, the seeming objectivity must be reconciled with the fact that some subject has made a choice about what to show.
None of this is gospel, of course. Many poems and photographs seek to be narrative. The poet is not a camera. But the intersections between the two is a large and rich topic, and my thoughts on it are always evolving.
Prior to your writing The Room In Which I Work, were your poems different than those that are in the book? If so, might you be willing to share A) an older poem and B) one from the book that you think aims to do something fundamentally different than the older work? And I guess hand-in-hand with that, do you view your own poetry within any specific lineage of any kind? While writing The Room In Which I Work, who were you reading? Did the work of any of those writers seep into the volume, either directly or indirectly?
Many poems were different, certainly, but the The Room In Which I Work also has poems in it that are of a kind I have been writing for years. The book feels like a natural outgrowth of two previous manuscripts I have written, one a gathering of lyric poems, and the other a haibun, where I was mixing poems and prose. But I envisioned it as a deliberate break with earlier work, because of the focus on a historical figure. Here is an early poem (written in 2004ish) from that first manuscript I mentioned, which later appeared in Iowa Review (thanks again to that magazine’s editors):
NOTES FROM A MUSEUM GUARD
In the palace of the curious, the world
continues to perpetrate its mysteries.
Middens, pickled orchids, forests
that stretch in endless resolution around
the glass. An observer’s fingers
can spin cedar carousels, green wheels.
There is a room of sleepy alphabets
where one can catch a word of the quick
dreams that stab the aged in mid-sentence.
The letters flutter to tongues as moths,
but mouths close on them like cages
after all the silence, decades of infection,
and no one remembers the cadence
of the ancient songs, their raveling.
At night I hear voices in the hall
of unbuilt machines, laughter and lament
intermittent as they look at plans to unearth
archives, portable stairs that compress
like bellows. Visitors are also specimens,
unconscious of what they display
in this place: bewilderment, elbows, noise.
An old abacus keeps track of the guests,
its calculus clicking around the ceilings
with dragonflies. Theft and trespass
are inevitable. I tell no one not to touch.
And here is a poem from The Room In Which I Work that I think is doing something different:
“MY HELIOGRAPHIC WORK IS IN FULL SWING”
Donkey sun, shoulders
of coal and pollen, despite
your excellence the experiment failed,
tin scrap scratching gravel
like an animal. Blossoms dare
the frost, a net to catch the thrush
who sings for us. Is there incense
to this picture, what is this picture
of? Towards Autun to look up
stone, I broke my lens of sharpest focus.
Off went the crow who had ended
the sentence of the power lines.
I think it is hard to place one’s self in a certain lineage, and I feel it can be dangerous to do so, because many people will want to define you with that label, and those labels are primarily limitations in my view. I will say that I am unabashed about writing what I consider lyric poetry, but I am trying to do it in a way that embraces openness and hybridity—collage can get into my poems, overheard speech, a range of elements. Over the past year I have been writing a lot of poems that break in and out of prose and verse.
As for writers I was reading while working on The Room In Which I Work, I remember re-reading Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater and Decreation, having Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch as a constant on the nightstand, and I always had Wallace Stevens’ and Robert Frost’s Collected Poems nearby, because I return to those poets often. Niépce’s letters were really one of the main things I was reading, as well as books on photographic history and theory, namely by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Geoffrey Batchen, and John Berger. So it was a mix as is usual for me, and I think elements of what I was reading then made it into the book. Anne Carson’s work taught me a lot about how a manuscript can hold together many types of writing.
Who are your favorite photographers and why do you like them to the extent that you do—and do they share any aesthetic similarities with your favorite writers?
Henri Cartier-Bresson was my first great photographic love, and I maintain that love. His ability to capture the confluence of people and their surroundings was uncanny. He found unexpected symmetry, humor, and pathos in life on the street, and I love that sensitivity to the quotidian, that eye for the art and humanity there. I also love Eugène Atget, who documented Paris as it was undergoing renovation in the early 20th century, and more of its warrens were being destroyed. He sold his photographs to artists and designers who needed them as studies. I admire Atget for reasons I mentioned earlier: his work is deliberately documentary, but then I find myself asking what exactly is he photographing? Why did he stand where he stood? The answer is often because it makes an iron railing in an old apartment building come alive, or animates some other architectural feature that was his subject. And in his work, there is the palpable sense that he knew what he was photographing would be lost, and I feel him throwing buoys into the unstoppable river of time. Walker Evans is also a touchstone. His photographs convey the beauty, and the strangeness, of a thing clearly seen. His approach is direct, impersonal, almost as if each time he set up the camera, he was setting out to manufacture a fact. But there is a lot of wit and elegance in his work, too, and a celebration of the American vernacular, and I think it’s augmented by that detached yet affectionate gaze. And it was about 10 years ago that I discovered the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, whose work has really struck me. He greatly admired Walker Evans, and shares with him a direct, frontal approach to most of his photographs. But many of them hint at the tricks or limits of perception—they are straight photographs of objects in the world, such as a restaurant interior, a book, a weight room, but space and scale seem off, collaged almost.
I think what these photographers share, aesthetically, with some of my favorite writers, is an ability to make the familiar strange.
I’ve asked this question to quite a few other poets before, but I’m always curious: do you have—or would you care to identify– favorite words you return to again and again in your work? Words that you like, for whatever reason. I asked Eileen Myles before and they hate and won’t use the word “shard”—too stereotypically poetic—and like and often employ “you” and “dog.” Michael Earl Craig stated that he’s not fond of “snack” or “moist” but goes wild with “little,” “tiny,” “violently,” “briskly” and “slowly.” Are there words, then, that you come back to again and again? Any words that you revile and won’t deign to write or type down?
Dark, light, night, sun, shadow, wind, world, are everywhere in my poems. I am not sure that there are words I won’t use because I hate them, but because I can’t imagine making them work in one of my poems. Like “destiny.” Or “festoon.” Words to work towards, I suppose.
Finally, any current or upcoming projects, books, photos, enthusiasms or other endeavors that you’re currently undertaking that Kenyon Review blog readers should take note of?
I am wrapping up work on a new manuscript, which gathers the poems I have been writing since I finished The Room In Which I Work. I also recently began being represented by the excellent Panopticon Gallery in Boston, so it is exciting to be working with Kat Kiernan there, and to be part of such a great group of artists. I am in a bit of a research and experimentation phase regarding new photographs, so all I can say is I’m trying some things out and seeing if they lead me somewhere. And I have been reading Fleur Jaeggy this winter, who is a new discovery for me, and I just love her work. Writing of unmistakable character.