{"id":67666,"date":"2014-03-07T11:58:17","date_gmt":"2014-03-07T16:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=67666"},"modified":"2014-03-07T15:33:23","modified_gmt":"2014-03-07T20:33:23","slug":"the-expression-of-not-knowing-an-interview-with-kevin-prufer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/03\/07\/the-expression-of-not-knowing-an-interview-with-kevin-prufer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Expression of Not-Knowing: An Interview with Kevin Prufer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"prufer<\/a>

Detail from the cover of Kevin Prufer\u2019s Churches<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Winter issue<\/a> of <\/em>The Paris Review includes Kevin Prufer\u2019s poem \u201cHow He Loved Them<\/a>.\u201d Prufer is the author of six books of poetry and the editor of several anthologies. His latest collection, <\/em>Churches<\/a>, was published this week. He teaches at the University of Houston.<\/em><\/p>\n

The poem stages a scene of terrible yet familiar violence\u2014a car bomb explodes in front of a courthouse, killing a colonel and his two granddaughters. But the poem is less about the event than the aftermath. The explosion becomes a spectacle for bystanders, who record it on their smartphones. In what ways are poems like our devices\u2014in thrall to spectacle, turning moments into eternities?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Turning moments into eternities\u00a0was truly at the center of the poem for me\u2014the idea of the afterlife, of divine translation. I imagined that the colonel, who acknowledges he has done terrible things, dies in a moment of inarticulable love for his granddaughters. Of course, he becomes\u00a0spectacle for us, his death recorded and uploaded to the Internet, where we watch it over and over again. But, in another way, perhaps he has been redeemed, has been, himself, uploaded to a kind of\u00a0heaven where his love is played out eternally. At least, that\u2019s how I like to think about him and the poem\u2014about the moral, spiritual, digital complexities that can be packed into a single moment \u2026 a moment we, unknowing, watch play out on our computer screens.<\/p>\n

The way this bomb works as \u201ca divine translation\u201d reminds me of another poem of yours, \u201cA Minor Politician,\u201d from National Anthem<\/em>. That poem is a posthumous monologue, delivered from the crypt. The speaker is an honorable pol, though he has served questionable goals. At the end of the poem, he sees God\u2019s hand, \u201clike a bomb,\u201d reaching through the catacombs to \u201ctake my body from the tatters \/ and lift me through the shadows \/ to the trees.\u201d Are these cases of redemption through violence?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the same question is at play, yes.\u00a0But the poems have very different contexts.\u00a0When I wrote National Anthem<\/em>, I was caught in a vortex during which all I could think about was classical\u2014mostly Roman\u2014history. I read about that to the exclusion of most other things. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were new and I was living in a small Missouri town very near an Air Force base, and heard echoes of Roman history everywhere.\u00a0That ancient politician thinks he has been redeemed by God, by God\u2019s hand breaking through the ceiling. But really, it was time and forgetfulness that redeemed him\u2014and one of our bombs breaking through his crypt two thousand years later, shedding light on him. <\/p>\n

I hear echoes of classical history in the present poem, too. The colonel is blown up in front of a courthouse, as if to say that some sort of judgment\u2014the tribunal of history?\u2014is being enacted here. How did you get caught in that vortex, and does classical history still inform your view of the present?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been trying very hard to move beyond classical history. After six books, it\u2019s easy to repeat myself, so I\u2019m feeling pressure these days to change the subject.\u00a0But, of course, I can\u2019t move beyond\u00a0history<\/em>\u00a0itself.\u00a0That would be impossible. I love a version of the Eliotic idea that to write literature is to live both within and without history, to participate in an enormous conversation that is inextricably historical, that is happening simultaneously\u2014all literature existing for us at once\u2014and also moving forward in time.\u00a0And I love to think about how history informs our sense of who we are, what we value. My father was an archaeologist and I spent my childhood weekends surrounded by the artifacts of his career or digging in the dirt for evidence of dead people. I really think that might have something to do with all this.<\/p>\n

A moment ago you mentioned Missouri, and now you cite a version of Eliot. Do you think of yourself as a poet of Middle America?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely I do. I grew up in Ohio, then lived most of my adult life in Warrensburg, Missouri, a small town in the western part of the state surrounded by farms. It was impossible to go to the Wal-Mart\u2014where most of the town\u2019s business was done\u2014without running into three or four people I knew. Most of my literary friends lived in New York City or San Francisco and at first I felt self-conscious about my small town, as if I were increasingly becoming a Midwestern hayseed.\u00a0After a while, though, I realized that my engagement with world events was enriched by living far from our big cities. Every day, I interacted with military people, who were often more sophisticated about the nuances of our adventures in the Middle East, for instance, than my other friends. I had students who\u2019d fought in our wars and students who left to fight. The Stealth Bomber flew over our house all the time, a very unstealthy reminder of what my taxes were funding.\u00a0I could hear the train several times a day, mostly not stopping in Warrensburg, but shuttling coal and other cargo through. I live in Houston now\u2014also a fine and undervalued place\u2014but the years I learned how to write were mostly in Missouri. I often miss it.<\/p>\n

I take it the present poem is set in the Middle East, home of the car bomb. What is your interest as a poet in political violence?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing an essay right now about politics and ambivalence in poetry\u2014how having multiple political feelings or beliefs in various, conflicting directions might be a valuable position for a poet to take. Poems are adept at expressing interior conflict, at enacting complex thought, at feeling strongly through\u00a0not-knowing\u2014but somehow, when we enter the territory of politics, we expect our poems to shill for votes, to argue strongly for particular beliefs.\u00a0Emily Dickinson does not know if there is a god or a void, an afterlife, a stasis, or a zero at the bone. But reading her theologically inflected poems allows us to wrestle with these unanswerable questions with her\u2014and to come out not with answers, but with a deeper sense of the questions. Maybe this is something our current political dialogues lack \u2026 something poetry could bring to us. I think those ideas are at the center of my interest in political violence in this poem.<\/p>\n

Several of your early books express strong feelings, though few certainties, about American politics, particularly the politics of empire. Many of these poems are cast in an elegiac mode, where you seem to hesitate between the attitudes of lament, forgiveness, and accusation. Is the elegy a good muse for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I like elegies when they are ambivalent instead of reverent. In one of the most frightening moments of my life, I had to interview W. S. Merwin on a stage in front of what felt like a thousand people. I had a few questions written down on note cards, but the conversation had run away from me and now he was talking about politics. I didn\u2019t know what to do. \u201cDo you think,\u201d I asked him, \u201cambivalence is a valuable political position for a poem?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d he said. \u201cNot at all.\u201d\u00a0And then he continued with his other thought, his real point. Of course, he was trying to get to matters that were urgent for him, but his answer bothered me, and the more I thought about it, the more I decided that ambivalence might be a valuable position for a political poem to take. That is, asking for a vote or agitating for reform are important, but so is thinking in a way that acknowledges how complex these questions are.\u00a0I feel that way about God\u00a0and\u00a0politics\u2014and I believe that poetry, with its dependence on the line, on white space, on metaphor and image, is an art suited to the expression of not<\/em>-knowing, to thinking and feeling in multiple, conflicting directions. The elegiac tradition, which is always looking back into a personal or even historical past and also living in an uncomfortable present, allows for that kind of contemplation.<\/p>\n

What you say about thinking in multiple directions brings up for me the question of form. For a long time now you\u2019ve been developing a particular kind of poem\u2014\u201cHow He Loved Them\u201d is an example\u2014long lines with irregular breaks. To my mind, the break allows for qualification, revision, reversal. How did you arrive at this sort of line?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I love the idea that a poem might live on the page in something like the way a thinking mind lives in the world. I imagine that my lines, which scurry across the page, stop, drop down a bit, then return, might suggest the ways that mind thinks, where it pauses and reconsiders, hesitates or rushes on.\u00a0I like the idea that white space at the ends of lines, between stanzas, might suggest places where unarticulated thought takes place\u2014the kind of thinking that precedes words, but creates them. Some of this I learned from reading Denise Levertov\u2019s wonderful essays. Some of it I worked out for myself, through trial and error.<\/p>\n

Your new book, Churches<\/em>\u2014whose title poem, I\u2019m pleased to note, was published in The Paris Review<\/em>\u2014is just out. Can you stand back from it yet and see how it relates to your earlier work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got one copy and am still turning it over in my hands wondering how all that work can weigh just four ounces. With Churches<\/em>, I\u2019ve moved away from the historical material I treated in National Anthem<\/em> and In a Beautiful Country<\/em>. Instead, I\u2019m working with characters\u2014experimenting with longer, braided narrative, trying to enact thought with a sort of emotional complexity I\u2019ve avoided in earlier poems. I love the idea that the stories we tell about ourselves\u2014and the ways we tell them\u2014inform our sense of who we are, where we belong in an enormous and intricate world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Winter issue of The Paris Review includes Kevin Prufer\u2019s poem \u201cHow He Loved Them.\u201d Prufer is the author of six books of poetry and the editor of several anthologies. His latest collection, Churches, was published this week. He teaches at the University of Houston. The poem stages a scene of terrible yet familiar violence\u2014a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[10610,13113,12287,2565,13114,9322,165],"class_list":["post-67666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-churches","tag-classical-history","tag-issue-207","tag-kevin-prufer","tag-middle-america","tag-middle-east","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Expression of Not-Knowing: An Interview with Kevin Prufer by Robyn Creswell<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 7, 2014 \u2013 The Winter issue of The Paris Review includes Kevin Prufer\u2019s poem \u201cHow He Loved Them.\u201d Prufer is the author of six books of poetry and the editor of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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