{"id":99564,"date":"2016-06-21T14:58:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-21T18:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99564"},"modified":"2016-06-21T16:28:24","modified_gmt":"2016-06-21T20:28:24","slug":"surrendering-to-your-own-maneuvers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/21\/surrendering-to-your-own-maneuvers\/","title":{"rendered":"Surrendering to Your Own Maneuvers: An Interview with Jana Prikryl"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jana-prikryl\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The After Party<\/a>, Jana Prikryl\u2019s debut collection of poems, is divided in two. In the first half, the reader is mainly in New York, swaying between the modern and the classical, easing between Internet aphorisms and well-dusted literary lives; in half a dozen gently mocking, moving lines in \u201cArs Poetica,\u201d we find ourselves falling from an observation about Kelly Oxford\u2019s tweets into Arthur Conan Doyle and the history of spiritualism. The collection\u2019s second half switches modes, and we find ourselves engaged with a long, bold sequence of fragments that carry an air of nostalgia. These later poems explore the natural world, the interplay between femininity and masculinity, and a lingering sense of not belonging. Perhaps it\u2019s an odd comparison, but the closing sequence, \u201cThirty Thousand Islands,\u201d made me think of Matisse and his 1940s cutouts: the preeminent sense of environment, but also the way that techniques of balance and contrast seem to give the work its structure and much of its impact.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Ideas of in-betweenness seem to be at the heart of everything Prikryl writes, and maybe that\u2019s unsurprising. When she was six, she and her parents and brother fled what was then Czechoslovakia. They settled in southern Ontario, and it is Canada\u2014particularly the eastern side of Lake Huron\u2014that provides the most memorable evocations of landscape: \u201cAn animal tone \/ to the granite \/ as it masses and hides in the water.\u201d Her poems have appeared in <\/em>The\u00a0<\/em>New Yorker, the <\/em>London Review of Books, <\/em>The Paris Review, and <\/em>The New York Review of Books, where she works as a senior editor. I asked Prikryl about how she balances writing and editing, her devotion to staying \u201ctrue to the movements of one\u2019s own mind,\u201d and her idea that poetry might be \u201cmeant to resist a certain kind of good time\u201d\u2014a form better suited to the after-party than the crowded room.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Can you talk a little about the structure of The After Party<\/em>\u00a0and the move from individual poems into sequential fragments that are not afforded the autonomy of their own titles?<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

When I started writing \u201cThirty Thousand Islands,\u201d the book\u2019s second half, the sequential nature of it took me by surprise. I\u2019d never written a very long poem before, and I didn\u2019t start with that intention in mind, and in fact as it accumulated I tried to distract myself from questions of its potential scale or meaning or ending. I think a person like me, who can\u2019t do narrative but needs to generate meaning through language, has to trick herself into productivity a lot of the time, especially when a longer project seems to beckon. And once the sequence was underway, it seemed the poems I\u2019d written one by one, in the first half, were galvanized by the stylistic difference of the sequence, as if the whole collection needed not to proceed from my center of gravity alone. I like Wallace Stevens\u2019s comment that the imagination is \u201ca violence from within that protects us from a violence without.\u201d It suggests something of how you have to surrender to your own maneuvers.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What kinds of maneuvers did you find yourself surrendering to?<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line where a piece of writing goes from \u201csurprising\u201d the writer to being subject to her control. I think this border has to be crossed in both directions, all the time, for a poem or book to have any vitality. As I say, I\u2019ve never had the capacity to invent fiction, but reconnoitering the possibilities of \u201cThirty Thousand Islands\u201d through these discrete island poems was a new kind of formal experience for me. More than an individual lyric poem, a sequence invites time into it. And if narrative remains elusive, I think both writer and reader are forced to work to orient themselves, to stay alert, like a foreigner in a new city at night.<\/p>\n

The tension between repetition and development in \u201cThirty Thousand Islands\u201d is something I hoped to emulate from John Berryman\u2019s Dream Songs<\/em> and Zbigniew Herbert\u2019s Mr. Cogito poems, and even Eliot\u2019s Four Quartets<\/em>, where time itself keeps raking over various northern landscapes. And after many years of composing distinct separate poems, I found constructing this sequence was a bit like writing a play\u2014it was a relief to feel that each utterance had to jostle against others, and that none had the last word.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve said before that \u201cA Place as Good as Any,\u201d one of the poems in The After Party<\/em>, is \u201ca transcription of a dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

Lately I came across a line by Anne Carson, in an essay on sleep. \u201cNo other experience gives us so primary a sense of being governed by laws outside us.\u201d Every night we enter this incredibly coercive state, and I think that sense of being harried by one\u2019s own consciousness nicely suggests the difficulty of being a person, born into certain historical circumstances, and not being quite sure where one\u2019s \u201cI\u201d resides within one\u2019s perceptions, or which kernel of those perceptions is most \u201cauthentically\u201d one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

I think right now readers of all genres put a lot of faith in language and its capacity to reveal\u2014possibly because we live in a time of unhinged political mendacity, so it\u2019s very comforting to believe that literature can provide direct access to someone else\u2019s uncomplicated truth? Even novels and poems are increasingly valued, I think, as repositories of information. I\u2019ve always been skeptical about that. Basically I hate poetry that pretends it\u2019s possible to say what you mean. Obviously you have to mean what you say! But in poetry just as in fiction, there can be a lot of truth in dishonesty. For me, the excitement of writing something like a poem usually resides in prodding and questioning the words that claim to represent what my brain claims to want to be saying.<\/p>\n

\"9781101906231\"<\/a>INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

A sense of place seems important in the collection, particularly in its second half\u2014the shores of Lake Huron.<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

I think place tends to serve as a shorthand for history. The things people have done to one another pile up in distinct patterns in certain places, and we call these layers of sediment \u201cthe local custom\u201d or \u201cnational character\u201d or \u201ctradition\u201d or \u201creligion\u201d or \u201cdialect.\u201d Having had a fairly peripatetic childhood\u2014between Czechoslovakia and Canada, and there was also a year spent in Austria\u2014and having lived in New York for almost thirteen years, I don\u2019t feel I can call any one place home, unless home is the odd-shaped constellation of writers I love.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been puzzled by Elizabeth Hardwick\u2019s criticism of Sylvia Plath\u2014whom I admire but don\u2019t feel especially close to\u2014along the lines that the \u201cbrutal\u201d quality of her work is owing to \u201ca special lack of national and local roots\u201d and \u201cher foreign ancestors on both sides.\u201d Aside from being strangely deterministic, the comment seems to imply that having national or local roots is the natural, inevitable way to be. Obviously that\u2019s not been my experience. I think it\u2019s increasingly rare for most people. One of the things Plath\u2019s poems dramatize so forcefully is the blunt fact that a woman or any member of a historically exploited group is a kind of rootless cosmopolitan\u2014almost by virtue of their exclusion or disadvantage, they can acquire an awareness of their society that\u2019s unavailable to those who have power. When I\u2019m writing, place usually acts as a metaphor for time and history, and for the ways a person\u2019s freedom and selfhood are circumscribed or enlarged.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that you were drawn back to writing about Canada.<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

I grew up in southern Ontario from the age of six, after my parents and brother and I fled Czechoslovakia, so I owe a lot to the place and to its warm embrace of my family. I often feel I owe my entire identity to it, since I can\u2019t imagine who I\u2019d be if my parents hadn\u2019t brought me where I\u2019d eventually learn to speak English. Yet as soon as I could make literary distinctions I gravitated toward American and English and Irish and Central European literature. As soon as I could leave, I did, first working in a bookstore in England for six months before university, then living in Dublin for almost two years after graduating, and eventually my romance with American literature brought me to New York City in 2003. So \u201cThirty Thousand Islands\u201d was also a way for me to reckon with my enormous, openly sentimental debt to a place whose actual literary tradition I happen to feel little affinity for. It\u2019s about the fairly common experience of homelessness on planet Earth, in other words. And the place itself\u2014this archipelago of pink rocky islands in a northern landscape, filled with pine trees and cottages\u2014is a bit neither flesh nor fowl, neither land nor sea, so besides being very pretty it seems to ask what \u201cplace\u201d is, just how much earth\u2014or local culture\u2014is required for a place to serve as home. I felt an urge to evoke that region and conjure its beauty, while humoring my own doubts (not total but persistent) about the uses of beauty in literature. Beauty is necessary in art, but I usually want it to go to the trouble of inventing new forms of itself\u2014which can appear unbeautiful at first\u2014and if I sense a writer is flashing too much beauty at me, I tend to question her motives.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What does your writing process tend to be\u2014the when, where and how\u2014and do you find yourself writing poetry even during busy periods of editing at the NYRB<\/em>?<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

I wish I was more disciplined. I rarely stick to a poetry-writing routine around the perimeters of my job at the Review<\/em>, especially as I often devote a lot of my free time to writing essays. It\u2019s been satisfying and enriching to write the essays, and in an ideal groove the writing of critical prose tends to irritate me into spinning off odd lines of verse that can grow into poems, with luck and application. But often there isn\u2019t enough time and the poems appear sporadically. I jot the odd line or note to myself in a notebook, and compose and revise the bulk of the poems on my laptop. It\u2019s true there is a certain zen state that can come of sitting in my cubicle at work and not actually being able to devote my full attention to the poem that\u2019s asserting itself. In these cases, I type quick e-mails to myself at work, and it\u2019s surprisingly freeing to write while part of the mind\u2014the self-censoring part?\u2014is occupied elsewhere, or at least aware of the inappropriateness of the task. And that said\u2014hello, colleagues!\u2014this doesn\u2019t happen more than about twice a year. One of the poems in the book, \u201cA Motion in Action,\u201d plays with this paradox of thwarted attention and enhanced intuition.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is it important in your work to bring moments of popular culture into proximity with what still gets called high culture\u2014Kelly Oxford\u2019s tweets segueing, within a few lines, into Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s surrender to the disciples of Madame Blavatsky?<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

Mixing high and low isn\u2019t important to me as such. I do think it\u2019s crucial to be true to the movements of one\u2019s own mind, if those movements are the premise of a given poem, as they are in \u201cArs Poetica,\u201d the poem you mention. There it seemed important not to pretend that musings on Twitter don\u2019t flow smoothly on to Madame Blavatsky\u2014though really what I was getting at was the problem of woolly, abstract language in contemporary poetry. I try to approach each new poem as an experiment whose parameters and materials aren\u2019t fully known to me until after the thing is written. When it comes to mixing high and low, T. S. Eliot is the usual suspect, and I love his poems and the freedom with which he moves between voices and sources, high and low\u2014but most interesting to me is how brazenly he goes from superhuman eloquence to language, or rhetoric, that has clearly failed the speaker.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is all writing about writing, all poetry about poetry?<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

All my favorite fiction and poetry in some sense is. I\u2019m trying to think of a book written so transparently that it achieves escape velocity from its own medium. One of my favorite recent books was Rachel Cusk\u2019s Outline<\/em>, which gets very close to this\u2014the language feels impersonal and almost antiseptic, yet it\u2019s one of the most emotionally true and intimate depictions of female adulthood that I\u2019ve read in a long time. But even Outline<\/em>, in finding a language of glass-like clarity and lack of affect, takes a position on the novel\u2019s form and seems to be proposing a new relation between prose and the experience it\u2019s trying to convey. Possibly because English is my first language but was the third one I learned, after Czech and German, and I still speak Czech but that\u2019s a kind of anti\u2013lingua franca whose foreignness feels sealed in my mind, I often find myself writing about the problem of language, the ways it\u2019s fortified against our attempts to claim it rather than the ways it\u2019s available to us.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What about the idea of the occult, and of mortality and afterlives, in your work?\u00a0<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

A good friend of mine paid me the highest compliment a few months ago when she read the book and said, It\u2019s all about death! I pumped my fist.<\/p>\n

I think any artist who makes things intended, however quixotically, to outlast them has to feel a little posthumous all the time. Afterlives and the occult I find pretty boring. The potency of death is to focus the mind on the particulars of life on this earth. I think this is also why poetry is such a visual art form. The simple act of looking is a good metaphor for gaining insight and for the speed-of-light connections of thought itself. And poets are people who look very closely \u2026 because death!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

As a writer of novels I hear constantly that the novel is dying. I imagine there might be something liberating or purifying about working in a medium, a beautiful and intensely difficult one, that a lot of people think is already long dead\u2014whatever they mean by that.<\/p>\n

PRIKRYL<\/p>\n

I think the reports of poetry\u2019s death have been greatly exaggerated. But you\u2019re asking if its perceived demise confers some advantage on poets, and I don\u2019t think marginalizing an art form can liberate or purify it. Any art that recedes from a respected orbit in culture grows provincial\u2014becomes a \u201ccraft\u201d\u2014because I think art needs an audience big enough for some portion of it to be really discerning.<\/p>\n

That said, I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s been shown that a profound understanding of poetry has ever been less obscure relative to dominant culture than it is now. There was the satirical poetry of the eighteenth century, sure, and people always seem to look back fondly on the nineteenth century, when classical literature and the poetic canon were prerequisites for the upper classes. Ben Lerner\u2019s new book, The Hatred of Poetry<\/em>, is pretty persuasive in suggesting that people have always indulged a nostalgia for a golden age of poetic literacy that never really existed. I guess I wonder if much of the poetry that was joyfully, popularly read in the nineteenth century was read in a way we\u2019d consider sophisticated now. What if poetry could actually be defined as that writing which defies mass appreciation, or penetration, and only ever attracts a minority of readers willing and able to sit alone with it and perceive the many formal and intuitive choices that went into its making? I\u2019m not saying it will always defy \u201cmass enjoyment,\u201d but it seems interesting to ask if poetry is meant to resist a certain kind of good time, and if it always has, even in the days when undergrads were quoting Horace to one another at parties.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Jana Prikryl\u2019s poems have appeared in <\/em>The Paris Review no.\u00a0206<\/a>, 211<\/a>, 215<\/a>, and\u00a0217<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jonathan Lee\u2019s latest novel is <\/em>High Dive.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The After Party, Jana Prikryl\u2019s debut collection of poems, is divided in two. In the first half, the reader is mainly in New York, swaying between the modern and the classical, easing between Internet aphorisms and well-dusted literary lives; in half a dozen gently mocking, moving lines in \u201cArs Poetica,\u201d we find ourselves falling from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":616,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[3401,3965,1432,241,16216,6487,21403,125,22922,16584,14136,7221,165,12043,2704,1772,22920,22921,22919],"class_list":["post-99564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-anne-carson","tag-arthur-conan-doyle","tag-canada","tag-interview","tag-jana-prikryl","tag-john-berryman","tag-jonathan-lee","tag-new-york-city","tag-ontario","tag-outline","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-rachel-cusk","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-t-s-eliot","tag-the-after-party","tag-thirty-thousand-islands","tag-writing-poetry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Interview with Jana Prikryl<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I think the reports of poetry\u2019s death have been greatly exaggerated. 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