Part 2

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

The ideal state is probably only come upon when I’ve been doing something like walking or reading. Looking at the internet will never bring me to the ideal state. It takes twenty to thirty minutes to even get going once I’ve decided it’s writing time. I take notes sometimes, writing up an idea I can easily add to.

I don’t know how to describe the ideal state, though. Maybe it’s a shade of nirvana in that once you try to describe it, it is gone. I will say though that throughout my years, conflict has brought out the muse more often than not—a conflict that was probably me trying to understand the world and, usually, other people—as the ideal state has often been disturbance. Not necessarily anger, but something more fruitful.

Maybe it’s just easier to write out of the saturnine mood—in one my essays, I did call “envy” the friend of the unsuccessful writer, but I think it is surely the friend of both successful and not.

Words can heal, but they can also hurt. Do you personally have experiences with either or both of these? Where do you personally see the biggest need and potential for literature and poetry as a tool for healing?

Yes, I’ve had experiences with both.

Words seems to be the fount and guillotine for friendships—across the board. It’s funny how words can take on a lackluster quality in a friendship—ones get bandied about in a certain argot, and then, suddenly, a tripwire! People are more sensitive than they’ll ever admit, yes? But doesn’t it often turn out that there were certain other things that made the tripwire plainly visible?

There are many scenes in films, often of grown children going to confront their parents before they die, but I wonder if the prevalence of these scenes on film points to a dearth of them in real life. The two most “true” are in Five Easy Pieces and Inside Llewyn Davis where the sons talk to the fathers, who by disease or hidden choice, can’t talk. I think this strikes as true because we often don’t get to say what we wanted to say before the end: Our Town. And here is where literature comes in, leading to the back half of the question: perhaps more pointedly because of language, literature helps us live our lives and helps us heal, even if we don’t think it is.

But it seems to have done so from an early age—where do we learn morals? Children’s stories, reading in grade school and high school—The Great Gatsby. So, perhaps literature sets us on our way and it is always there for us if we need it. We return to Beckett over the years—“time passes”—and we begin to see our advancing age or more of it and there is a new sting each time.

There is a fine line between cultural exchange and appropriation. What are your thoughts on the limits of copying, using cultural signs and symbols and the cultural/social/gender specificity of art?

I don’t know, usually I’d prefer that nothing is off-limits because I think that can take the charge out of someone’s art—being worried about stepping on toes—we live in a time when the speaker of the poem is too often conflated with the poet, something Anthony Hecht cuttingly expounded upon: “There are always readers who seek, not art, but something documentary and unassailably factual; when these two categories seem mysteriously intermingled, they will always prize the second over the first.” On the other hand, one of the most controversial instances of appropriation, Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report, seems mindless, almost as if his “work” had become as invidious as corporations who now tout BLM and to stop Anti-Asian hate only because it is in their monetary interest to do so.

There’s a way to make art where you have basic human decency and show the ugliness of life—at the same time. Oliver Stone made one of the most heinous films I can remember, Natural Born Killers, where he thought he was criticizing somebody or some thing, but he was only glorifying violence—and making money off of that.

Literature works with sense impressions in a different way than the other arts. How do you use them in your writing? From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work?

I think I use sense impressions like a film director might, because that was my first love and I began seeing the world in a frame with a soundtrack, early on. The sense of film editing, too: in watching a plane cross the sky and then hearing a child cry out nearby, I would try to introduce some other disjunction into this film I was documenting, like the memory of Enya music or Eno music (early vocal Eno) and then my mother’s voice. This has continued somehow into the writing.

I was always centered on dialogue for the screenplays—I don’t talk much, I’ve often been a listener. Those old Irishmen in pubs could smell me coming a kilometer away when I was in their land—they cornered me and I studied them. In NYC, I wrote in libraries for many years and so watched an incredible amount of homeless people and heard how they spoke to themselves—the absolute jewels—as piquant as Beckett or Pinter. I then worked with the homeless and undoubtedly took something from that.

I think Robert Bresson films and his canards about film answers your question better than I can—he said, “Life is mysterious, and we should see that on-screen. The effects of things must always be shown before their cause, like in real life. We’re unaware of the causes of most of the events we witness. We see the effects and only later discover the cause.” So in the horrible denouement of L’Argent we don’t see the murderer kill, we see the aftereffects or the dog running around, not knowing what is happening. Bresson also shows we can be taken in quite different directions by sounds—the sound of the axe being hoisted in the air is the scariest “image” (the sound begins a half -second before the actual shot of the ax) in the sequence.

I often experience the world in this way and maybe it comes out in the writing, since Marianne Moore says, “you don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of personality.” Sounds have grown more frustrating (noise pollution) so even if libraries were open, I couldn’t write in them any more. I’m not an “in my body” person, like dancers, or writers who dance. Head and heart and gut.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I think Claire Denis is an artist or Joseph McElroy is an artist. I think it’s a title that has to be conferred on someone, because to me it is an honorific. So many make the claim, but in my eyes, artists are people who have done the work and made something that stands out. The most I say when people demand an answer is: “I write.” That is my truth. So my approach starts there.

I’m reverent to art, mainly to great art, but I can see an entertainment value and good comedy in something subaltern like Smokey and the Bandit, particularly Jackie Gleason’s performance—there was only one Jackie Gleason—and even in the witty alliteration in some of the dialogue: “Bank-robbing? Bank-robbing is babyshit alongside of what this dude is doing,” a line uttered by Gleason with a half a hamburger in his mouth. So there’s reverence and irreverence. And sometimes people profess to admire what doesn’t stand muster for me—though many people see value in the current examples of autofiction, I do not.

Ten years ago I wanted to interview two of the greatest prose writers in the language—Christine Schutt and Gary Lutz—for The Paris Review, but I was told it was too soon to anoint them with that and still some people lay on the horn with their recriminations. I know I’ve gone off a little, but these concerns make up my approach more than anything—it’s really not about me, it’s about the long train of great art through the centuries, it’s about Shakespeare and Bergman and striving to bring one’s art to that level, because that’s where it has to be. And if someone is trying something out of the ordinary, I’m much more supportive of their efforts than safe, staid work.

What can literature or poetry express about life and death which other forms of art may not?

I can only speak to my experience. When my father died, I could not read fiction for some months (as I couldn’t do at the beginning of the pandemic) and poetry was all I could fill my head with (or essays on it). Poetry seems to lend itself to the shadow side of our life, much more than fiction, maybe because it is a very solitary experience—the voice of the poet, through the speaker of the poem (in the words of the poet), going into the reader and the many gradations of the process.

Fiction seems more myriad and group-like—I’m thinking of book clubs, but also perhaps that fiction is for the many—mass-produced it ranges farther—and poetry has often been on a small scale, chapbooks. Maybe because of literature’s basis in the word, it can express multitudinous states, given there are so many words and synonyms. Images (film) seem harder for audiences to decode, possibly due to film being the youngest medium.

There are a lot of paradoxical things going on in Antonioni’s frames (I won’t even go to Stan Brakhage)—and years ago, paying audiences responded to Blow-Up, probably because of the mystery story and sex swirling within it, but I fear general audiences (not cinephiles) today, when given something comparable, maybe Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films, just don’t know how to read it. I don’t think YouTube and the “everyone is an artist” zeitgeist has helped this.

I know I’m going on the shore of other questions, but it seems the endpoint of this is that people are turning to things other than literature and film—and that would be the egomania of social media and TV series. Aside from Twin Peaks, I don’t think the images there are really challenging people and expressing the awing and ineffable that we’re always looking for in art. Maybe social media can help sell one’s art and if it frustrates one enough, also make it better.