Paul Guest is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Because Everything Is Terrible, and a memoir, One More Theory About Happiness. His writing has appeared in POETRY, Paris Review, Tin House, Slate, New England Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and numerous other publications. A Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. His poem “Testimonial” can be found here. It appears along with another poem in the May/June 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Testimonial”?
I wrote “Testimonial” in the summer, in August, I think, when the air was at its thickest and the heat was almost unbearable, even for me, who grew up in the south, in Georgia, where weather like that was the norm. I had that morning read in the news an article about the ever-accelerating rate of glacial melt in the Arctic and it struck me that maybe we, as a species, had crossed some fire line that could not be ignored.
Can you talk a little more about this opening line, “It’s difficult to care, much, for so much death”? And what made you want to incorporate the ocean, to talk about fish in relationship to pollution, and the surreal scope of these problems?
The opening line of “Testimonial” speaks to the challenge of, frankly, caring about a dying world, to think about time beyond the scopes of today or tomorrow or next week or next year. It’s easy to live through time in that way—much harder to be present and active in it, especially when there is so little we can do.
The world seems to have shifted since you wrote this poem. Do you expect your readers to connect with it differently during the pandemic?
I don’t expect my readers to read this poem differently now, but I think it’s unavoidable. I read it differently. I think I have felt like there was an apocalypse just on the horizon since I was a child, since I was twelve years old when I broke my neck in a bicycle accident and nearly died. After that, it was easy to imagine ruin.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I look back at old poems and am usually embarrassed and I’m glad for it—if I didn’t feel that way, if the quarter century of writing poems hadn’t changed me in any way, I’d feel like I’d have wasted so much time.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
It’s probably reading that most influences my writing. There is so much more going on in the outer world when compared to the little bit that takes place inside.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
One teacher once said to me, You’re almost as good as you think you are. I laughed then because I really appreciated the simultaneous validation—I wasn’t completely hopeless!—and the challenge that was explicit—be better.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m working on two new manuscripts that may or may not remain separate collections. That uncertainty is both frightening and exciting.