By Eric Paul
Around the time I started looking into MFA programs, I stumbled across a poem in the Greensboro Review called “I Have A Theory About Reflection.” I fell in love with this poem. I read it obsessively and developed a strong connection with it. It was beautifully crafted. It was odd in all the right ways, rich in meaning and its subject matter was daring. I immediately went out and bought everything by the poet. In my buying frenzy, I noticed the poet was a professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
After I was accepted into the program, I was asked by the program director why I chose to apply to FDU. I told the director I was an admirer of one of their instructors and needed to study with her. That poet was Renée Ashley.
As I had hoped, Renée and I formed a unique connection. She intuitively understood the subject matter of my work–the route of its inspiration–and quickly recognized how I could improve upon my numerous shortcomings. Over the years, I would email and call her to complain about vast subjects including the ongoing infestation of dandelions that had taken over my lawn, rejection letters, the Republicans, my creative stubbornness. At some point during those conversations, I became a better poet.
Of course, I have her to thank for it.
Renée Ashley’s most recent collection, A View from the Body, was recently published by Black Lawrence Press. She is the author of four other volumes of poetry: Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea, Basic Heart (winner of the X.J.Kennedy Poetry Prize), The Revisionist’s Dream, The Various Reasons of Light, and Salt (winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry), as well as a novel, Someplace Like This, and two chapbooks, The Museum of Lost Wings and The Verbs of Desiring. A portion of her poem, “First Book of the Moon,” is included in a permanent installation by the artist Larry Kirkland in Penn Station. She has served as Assistant Poetry Coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and as Poetry Editor of The Literary Review.
Because Renée’s work and mentorship have greatly influenced my own work, I jumped at the chance discuss her brilliant new collection The View from the Body.
Eric Paul: Whenever I embark on a new creative project—whether it is a collection of poems or writing a new album—I become overwhelmed by the process, which invariably leads to obsession, which leads to an unhealthy variety of anxieties. I tend to become fixated and can hardly think about anything else beside the line, image, arrangement, or lyric that I’m struggling with. It quite often has a serious effect on my mood and ultimately my happiness to the point that I wonder why or how I ever create anything.
While in school and even after school while you were editing my recent collection, I would often call you mid-meltdown, begging for creative and spiritual guidance and you would always kindly say,“Eric, calm down! It’s only a poem!” While I appreciated this advice and welcomed your comforting tone, I can’t understand how you stay so calm during your process. Every artist has their process but, after working so closely with you over the past few years, I am amazed by your collected-ness. What is it about your process that allows you remain so calm? What have you learned that I haven’t? Why? How?
RA: Why? Good grief. Because I would’ve had a stroke long ago if I got as goofy as often as you do! How? Well, I think our different circumstances point to the how. Because you’re a lyricist and vocalist, you undoubtedly associate (consciously or unconsciously) the writing with performance and the public. That’s enough to get anyone’s blood to boil. I, on the other hand, associate writing with alone time, introspection, and some sort of alpha-ish associative mindset (at least for first drafts) and dogs lying on my feet. Writing for me is preternaturally private.
As you say, each artist has a particular process. Yours, apparently, includes coming unglued in the face of a new project. But my beginnings and endings don’t have hard edges. Inevitably, when I near the end of a long project, something new starts interjecting itself into the work, something that doesn’t quite blend seamlessly with the project at hand. I don’t allow myself to desert the work that’s nearing completion; I acknowledge the new impulse (allow myself to jot down short notes or cut articles or poems or photos, whatever it is), but I don’t enter deeply into it. I toss those notes into a box, and go back to what I’d been working on. That may be the only rule I’ve ever set for myself that I’ve kept to. I work on one poem at a time. One book (in a genre) at a time. But I already have my sort-of-foot-in-the-door to the new work before I finish the work at hand. I rarely face a vacuum—I’ve got those bits and glimpses in the box and I’m anxious to see where they’ll take me, what I’ll have to say, and how I might say it. Beginnings are great: the doors and windows are wide open; whatever house there may be is hovering above the ground. It has no roof. And there’s no map of the neighborhood.
My prose process, though, has its little bit of crazy. But it’s not compositional; it’s more structural. It’s when I feel that I’ve covered something close to the whole—in a novel or a long essay—and it’s time to start putting those small bits together. I have paragraphs or sections, or ideas or quotes, all those whatevers, that need to be combined and aligned; or chapters that need to be ordered, transitioned, etc. Then I have to have the whole of the project in my head at once—which is difficult for me. It’s at this point that I believe I’m absolutely nuts for thinking I can write at all. That I’m deluded. That the writing’s a bunch of crap and that I should go back to work at the cheese store—that my future should smack of Stilton. I’ve learned, though, to just grit my teeth and push through it. It’s sheer will at that point. The investment has already been enormous; I’m not going to throw it away just because I’m too lazy to want to pull it together at the end. And, experience has shown me that my right brain (metaphor or not) knows more than I do. Despite my scattered method of composition, that part of me has somehow kept the thread running; I can’t think of a time at which it has led me disastrously astray. I’ve learned to force myself to move ahead and to trust what it is I know I do. Granted, the process could let me down at any time, but nobody’s safety is at stake. The world won’t come to an end if whatever-it-is sucks or doesn’t make it into the public sphere. It really helps to know just how inconsequential—in the largest of senses—what we do is. And I don’t say that in a bitter way, I swear. It’s a relief. The world isn’t out there panting, waiting for our work. Nothing resembling world peace is hanging on our word. It’s the ultimate freedom, actually. If you choose to write the kind of stuff I write, you do it for the love of doing it; if it gets acknowledged, that’s fabulous. If it doesn’t, well, see above.
At some point in the eighties, the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly told me a great story that set me free. I know that sounds flaky, but it’s true nevertheless. She had decided to become a painter, and she said as much to an artist friend of hers who told her something along the lines of, “That’s fabulous, Brigit. You’ll be wonderful. Just remember nobody cares.” She laughed when she told me, but she was telling me how I’d have to live my life. It was spot-on. It must have hit her exactly the same way when she heard it that first time. Absolutely true. It’s a break-neck recognition.
EP: I was recently reading an interview with Mathias Svalina, a poet whose work you introduced me to, in Book Slut. During the interview, Mathias was asked if he remembered the first poem he ever wrote. Although he didn’t remember, he answered by reminiscing about the first time a poem ever affected him. I thought this was an excellent question and even better response.
Do you remember your first poem? Do you remember the first poem that ever affected you?
RA: The good news is that I am spared the memory of my first poem. The bad news is I recall with the utmost clarity that I used to write bouncy, rhyming poems (for “extra credit,” I guess) for my teachers. In fourth grade, I think, Mrs. Chapman sent my poem to the Redwood City Tribune. It got published. There must have been a children’s section in the paper. I nearly died of embarrassment. Mrs. Chapman told my mother. I wanted to disappear into the ground. It had been a thing just between her and me. I didn’t want her or my mother to tell anyone, especially the other kids, and yet I was somehow pleased about the publication at the same time. But, good grief. I was already enough of a dork. I didn’t need the extra dork-scrutiny.
The first poem that did its work on me was many years later, more than a decade, actually. And even then it wasn’t the poem itself, but the poet, and, perhaps the nature of poems themselves. I’d gone to a writing conference at Foothills College. I was writing fiction and had no interest in poetry. There was a period during the day-long conference in which nothing sounded interesting, so I slipped into the auditorium where it was cool. I thought I’d work on my story. There was a poetry reading going on; I figured I could block it out. John Logan, who is gone now, was reading. And he was reading a poem about a boy and an older man in a bar, as I recall, and it had something to do with a maraschino cherry. He was really something. I never found the poem afterwards—so I may be misremembering it entirely—but I swear a light went on in my head while he was reading. It was suddenly clear that poems were just another form of communication, that they weren’t created with the intent of being forms of torture and humiliation, or a teacher’s opportunity for condescension. (A teacher at another community college taught Beatles’ lyrics, Bob Dylan, and Simon and Garfunkel in the poetry class. I was totally pissed and lost all respect for the guy. What a con.) Anyway, John Logan, this big, funny, sweet man was speaking poetry. I think it was the hearing of it, rather than reading it to myself or “studying” it, that made all the enormous difference.
EP: I have to admit, I would LOVE to see a bouncy, rhyming Ashley poem.
RA: Oh, I bet you would! But don’t hold your breath! You’re going to have to settle for the bouncy woman. I’m telling you, the rhythm and the rhyming would have made you weep. And, anyway, you already have ammunition for blackmail. Remember at a residency you commented on my camouflage pants? You said it in the nicest way. I was bending over at the time, trying to dig something out of my suitcase. You said, while my back was turned, “I think it’s so cool you wear camouflage pants”—which, of course, immediately made me think I shouldn’t be wearing them. That they were age- and girth-inappropriate. That’s all the ammunition you’re going to get. To my great sorrow, it’s probably more than sufficient. I still have them. I still wear them. I always think of you when I do.
EP: Some time ago, you sent me an early version of The View from the Body. At that time, you mentioned that you had been submitting The View from the Body for close to ten years and had only been met with rejection until, of course, Black Lawrence Press accepted it. When I first heard this I was completely blown away. I wondered how a collection with such a unique voice could be ignored by so many publishers.
First, I want to thank Black Lawrence Press for giving the world the gift of this book. Second, how do you deal with having your work rejected? I know a lot of writers struggle with the feelings associated with having their work overlooked. It took me a few years to not internalize it. How do you view it?
RA: Part of why I don’t get crazy-down is that the rejections are private; they come by mail or email. If I had to present poems in person to editors, I’d never have submitted at all. I don’t want to see someone’s face as I’m told I don’t stack up. A look of disdain or disappointment can burn itself into my retinas for forever. Looks like that—and dismissive or condescending tones of voice—are my poison. But in private, in a written communication, there’s no face to it, so it doesn’t matter at all. There are so many writers, so many poems, so many books being written—and so many of them are really, really good. The competition for publication is beyond insane, and editorial tastes can be utterly subjective. As long as I know I’ve done the absolute best I was able in that poem or essay or collection, and that I can still stand by it, that’s what matters in the end. I’m not saying that I don’t sometimes wonder if I’m fooling myself: I certainly do. But all I can do is my best. You can’t make someone like either you or your work. It’s not that I don’t have an ego, I do. A big fat one. (Writers have to have absurdly large egos to think anyone might want to read what they’ve written, don’t you think?) But I also know that I’m one drop in an ocean.
EP: As a musician, I’m acutely aware of the rhythm or musicality in the poetry I read. In The View From the Body I can’t help but feel like I noticed a departure in the normal rhythm of your work. To me, the poems in this collection have an odd syncopated feel as opposed to your previous work that seems to have a smooth, effortless and consistent rhythm. Do you agree with this? Or, am I totally wrong? Was this a conscious effort?
RA: Hmm… I’ve been told, too, that my rhythms are pretty consistent, an obvious tell in my work. Perhaps it’s because you’re most familiar with Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea? It’s mostly prose poems. Perhaps The View from the Body reads differently for you because of those rhetorical tensions occasioned by the line breaks? Perhaps that’s what feels syncopated to you? They certainly add something that isn’t available in the right-and-left justified prose poem. I don’t know. If there’s a different sense of rhythm, I’m not aware of it. But that by no means it isn’t there! Curious. I know you have an excellent ear. If you figure out what it is, let me know. I’m probably the last person who’d see something different that, perhaps, came naturally. I’m oblivious.
EP: My apologies, Renée. But, I have to (respectfully) disagree with you. I am very familiar with all of your work. I have only seen this type of syncopation in your collection The View from the Body and . . . perhaps in Basic Heart. But then again, maybe I’m just trying to antagonize you. We do have our share of “creative differences.” This wouldn’t be the first time right?
RA: Ha! No, not at all! But you always just make me laugh. I remember trying to give you examples of what I was trying to get across in your poems and you holding back and holding back and then saying, trying to be so polite about it, “No. No. It’s way too … Renée.” And I’d be saying, “No! No! It’s just an example!” Your instincts have always been good. Like your nature. And your ability to wait the work out until you get it exact. Our work’s really different, but the lumber’s the same. Yours just gets run through your mill and mine through mine.
As for the syncopation issue? I will concede to your colder ear and eye—I just don’t know. And someday, when I’m far, far older than I am now, on my death bed, perhaps, and really, really bored, I’ll take a look. Perhaps they are dissimilar. Or perhaps you’ve simply had auditory damage from all that loud music. I’ve watched the videos, you know. It’s crazy-loud.
EP: I once attended a lecture you gave on creating potent and unique images by approaching it the same way a painter would view a canvass. Among many valuable insights I left that lecture with, I remember you suggesting that the strength of the poem can rely on choosing unlikely images. You mentioned that a writer might want to consider going with the second or third image that occurs to them and never settling on the first image. I loved that lecture. I’ve always loved that advice. I share it with my students. Would you be kind enough to share key points from your ideas on this?
RA: I turned that lecture into an essay called “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Painting in the Poem, Or, Simple Perspective for Poets: A Mini-Essay.” It was about poems having foregrounds and backgrounds, which is something we don’t think about much. It was published in Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics (#5, 2006). The comment that’s stuck with you, though, is tangential to the main thrust of that lecture. It seems to me that, especially for younger writers, the image or comparison that first comes to mind is too familiar, a cliché, or just plain tired language. Stephen Dunn would call it “untested” language, which is a great turn of phrase. I often tell young folks who are consciously trying to create a metaphor or simile, to very quickly make a list of vehicles for their tenor—and then to cross off the first three or five on the list, to start their writing with something that didn’t so easily come to mind. Many years after I gave that lecture, I studied for several weeks with Brenda Hillman at Atlantic Center for the Creative Arts in Florida. What I took away from that experience was “Revise towards the strange.” It’s the same thing, I think, in a more compressed, more broadly applicable form. And very, very good advice.
EP: Is there another way to view this essay outside of its publication in Fulcrum? Maybe we could make it available?
RA: It’s not online, alas. But it’s in the manuscript of essays that I’m circulating now. If someone wanted to reprint it, that’d be lovely. Otherwise, I don’t know how to make it available. I can certainly give you a copy of the essay, if you’d like!
EP: In the time I have known you–first as a teacher and now as a friend, editor and spiritual advisor during poetic meltdowns–I’ve noticed you develop incredibly deep relationships with your students. I’m amazed at how a writer with your talent so easily shares her gift and insights. I believe this quality in you is what made studying under you so special for me. Every piece of advice felt more like a deeply held secret than just a critique from a teacher and, although sometimes your guidance was abrupt, I always felt the compassion behind it. It was so important for me because I studied poetry to understand how I could better communicate a very difficult subject matter with the world. It was and continues to be a very vulnerable place to be and you recognized that immediately and always were conscious of that vulnerability while guiding me.
With that in mind…what motivates you to reveal so much of your gift and so much of your heart to your students? Is it even conscious? And how did you so quickly recognize what I was trying to achieve in my work in terms of subject matter and approach?
RA: Abrupt! That’s a great word. Yes! I’ve been called some shady synonyms-turned-nouns in that vein! That’s funny. At one school I taught at, a state college, at the end of a semester a nice young woman gave me a gift, a little glass bell that had a ceramic dragon on top. It was a sweet, odd little gift and I must have looked puzzled. She gasped when she saw I didn’t get the reference; her hand flew up to her mouth. She said, “You don’t know!” And I said, “I don’t know what?” And she started laughing and said, “They call you ‘the dragon lady’!” I still have that little bell. It makes me smile every time I see it! And I am a hardnose, I guess. I get so into it. We’re talking only about words on a page, though, not character or destiny. My stance is that if you don’t want to know what I think, then don’t ask me—and if you’re in my class, you’ve asked.
I think perhaps I share the way I do—that thing you said about secrets—because I didn’t have a concentrated education in creative writing. I was far too shy to take creative writing in college as an undergraduate; I wanted to, but they wouldn’t let me audit and no way was I going to have my work criticized publicly. Seriously? I would have died on the spot. So except for a course here and there, I’m self-taught. I had to find the answers to my questions in books or work them out for myself. I didn’t know any accomplished writers; nobody was around to tell me what I needed to know, so whatever it is I think I know was hard won. Teaching, articulating what you might not otherwise have to, is fabulous for learning, by the way, but you can’t teach intuition or accident. I try to teach recognition: the knowing of when and where your writing’s working and why and when it’s not. Often, a student will write something mind-blowingly wonderful and they have no idea what they’ve done. They don’t see it at all. (And vice versa, alas). They often have to be taught why something’s wonderful. Or how it’s fallen short. I’m their short-cut, is all.
There’s probably a couple of reasons that I work the way I do and get close to (at least some of) my students—but seriously, don’t all teachers become friends with some of their students? The first is that I love talking about writing. I find it the most interesting thing in the world. And to have folks who want to talk about this with me is just such fun! I love to see their recognitions, the lights go on above their heads. The second reason—and one I can claim only for myself—is that I have boundary issues. For the most part, I lack them. It’s a huge failure. And it’s exhausting. But, on the other side of that, I’ve made some friends I’ll have for the rest of my life. It’s only when someone tries to bullshit me that the wall goes up. There have been, no doubt, more than a few students who’ve run up against that wall. It’s a truly unlovely thing.
As for you and your work… you were a whole different ballgame. You came fully conscious and almost fully formed. We talked for hours on the phone before you ever entered the program, remember? I knew you before I knew you! When I read your application I went to the office and said, “I want this guy. He’s mine.” There was that piece about fish in your application package that just killed me; I think it’s from your first book. It was a voice unlike any other; it had a maturity and self-knowledge. Your sensibility was already in place. You’d been writing long before you came to the MFA, you’d gotten experience in both the composition of poetry and lyrics. You knew how performance can play into it. You seemed to know exactly what you wanted and were willing to listen to how it might be achieved. And you don’t have an arrogant bone in your body. No one in her right mind would have tried to sway you from what you were aiming at. It was too good! The trick for an instructor, I think, is to read the work and see what it’s trying to do, not what you want it to do, not impose yourself on it. Help the work succeed on its own terms. It was easy with you. The map was there. The trip was and still is a hoot. It makes me very happy!
EP: Wow! Thanks Renée, that is kind of you. And yes, I can attest to your boundary issues. But, I think it’s what makes you so endearing. On my first day of class you greeted me with a huge bear hug. That very kind gesture alleviated most of the fears and anxieties I had before entering the program.
RA: I remember that! I also remember your face! We’d talked forever, but never seen each other before! (Well, OK, I admit I Googled you and Arab on Radar and The Chinese Stars.) And I was so excited to see you! But that first night of the residency you didn’t know anyone and had no idea who the crazy, short woman was who was throwing herself at you! It was pretty funny. . . I can still see your face so clearly! It was a sort of “What do I do with this?” look! Ha! It’s been good times ever since. We found each other at a good time.
EP: Beside your adoration for Janis Joplin or that you used to ride a motorcycle (which I am guessing only a few people know about), can you tell me something about yourself that I don’t know? Is there anything?
RA: If you knew everything about me, that’d be creepy. And I have to hold some stuff back for your old age. So I’ll tell you something. It’s possible you already know it though. That I wouldn’t do any of it—the writing, the teaching—if I didn’t feel driven to? That, if I thought I could be happy watching TV all day and eating bonbons and barely lifting my head, I’d take that life in a second! I’m extraordinarily lazy, damn near inert. Entropy is my middle name. And I hate that in myself. I make myself crazy; I can’t stand lying down in a shallow pit, and yet it’s my best trick, my nature through and through. But my nature makes me miserable. I had a quote on my door for years and it’s gone (it probably fell off and one of the dogs ate it), and I forget who said it, but it was a visual artist rather than a writer, and it was something very like, “Everyone has to do something. I paint.” Well, evidently, I write.
Eric Paul is a writer and musician from Providence, Rhode Island. Eric has released two full-length volumes of poetry: I Offered Myself As The Sea and A Popular Place To Explode. Both releases offered by Los Angeles-based Heartworm Press. Eric holds a BFA in Philosophy from Rhode Island College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Most recently, his work has appeared in New York Observer, Impose Magazine, Ninth Letter, The Volta, Word Riot, Lunch Ticket, and Spork, Booth, and The Literary Review.