| chad
prevost
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Christopher Buckley
since 2003 when he submitted the winning chapbook manuscript
of non-fiction writing to the annual Terminus Magazine contest.
Still, not until 2005 did I come across a volume of his poems
(Fall from Grace, 1998) in a public library. Immediately,
I felt a visceral connection with the poems. I re-contacted
him and let him know what the poems had meant to me.
Since then, it has been my great pleasure to get to know him
and his poetry that much better. Although he has been
publishing in the highest caliber literary magazines for over
25 years, it would seem that his work—and his generous
spirit—deserve far more audience. In light of
that, I developed the questions for this interview over several
months and finally sent them off more or less at the same
time by email in early August, 2006.
Chad Prevost: What initially led you
to writing poetry? What were your early ambitions, hopes
and dreams? What are some of your earliest memories
that you associate with the desire to write poetry?
When did some of these early hopes and dreams hit a crisis
point (assuming they did), and what negotiations did you make
in your life to keep writing?
Christopher
Buckley: I attended a Catholic grammar school
in the ‘50s; the nuns had us writing poems fairly routinely.
Sometime during college, I found a Mother’s Day card
I had made in 4th or 5th grade among some papers in the garage
I was helping my mother reorganize. It consisted of
three or four abab rhyming quatrains, which said, I’m
sure, nothing original. I was amazed however that I
had kept to the rhythm and rhyme scheme so well at that age.
I had drawn blue birds flying through the clouds, at the edges
of the stanzas—birds each with large hearts in red or
purple. English was my favorite subject in grammar and
high school, and somehow I think I knew the lyrics to all
the rock-‘n’-roll 45s that I collected as well
as those to the records my father and mother always played,
words to songs from the ‘40s and early ‘50s that
no teenager then listened to. My father was a disc jockey
and later ran a radio station, so music and words were almost
hard-wired into my synapses early on. And I was a surfer,
beginning at about age twelve. There were only two surf
magazines at the time and one day opening the new issue of
Surf Guide in the liquor store, I found a center fold out
of a perfect wave and inscribed inside the wall of the wave
was a stanza from “The Garden of Proserpine” by
Swinburne. I think I was fourteen then and his grand
music and dramatic diction swept me away. It’s
one of the few pieces of poetry I still have committed completely
to memory.
I was a bit of a child
prodigy in tennis and began teaching tennis early on.
There was a conflict between tennis and surfing. Surfing
won out in my later teen years, but I went back to tennis
in my 20s as I needed summer jobs. I was still playing
and teaching when home from grad school at San Diego State
where I was working with my first poetry workshop teacher,
Glover Davis, an early student of Levine’s. One
summer, my old pro, Mike Koury—rest his sweet soul—asked
me if I was interested in any of two or three club jobs that
were coming available. This caused a bit of a crisis
as a full time job at one of the tennis or country clubs,
a regular salary, sure looked good to anyone scraping by trying
to get through grad school. I had known Mike a long
time and as much or more as my playing, he valued my ability
to teach. I had to decide pretty quickly whether to
take a nice job as a club pro or continue as a grad student
writing poetry. It was pretty obvious where the immediate
rewards were. I wasn’t having all that much success
as a poet; I was not the star of the workshop and I was not
publishing. I worked hard and long at each poem, walking
through what seemed like a continual fog, and not many poems
succeeded. Luckily, Glover gave me a talk one day about
being willing to risk failure—without that, he advised
me, I would never know if I could be a poet. That and
the fact that that summer the station wagons kept pulling
up hourly and emptying out another dozen kids in the city
recreation program for tennis, helped me choose the very tenuous
career path of writing.
I sold my VW van 3/4s
of the way through San Diego State to have the money to finish
my degree. At Irvine, I took out loans and was a tutor
for a composition class. Though I had an M.A. and some
teaching experience, I had to arm wrestle with the chair for
a couple quarters before I could even be a tutor. The
TA positions went to other students with no experience from
out of state. I worked for a TA from Michigan who, honest
to god, did not know a noun from a verb, but he got the money.
So sure, that was just the start of negotiations and compromises
you have to make to keep on writing.
My dreams and goals then
were simply to write good poems, poems that poets I admired
would say were clear and fresh and meant something.
Though I published a few poems in grad school, I don’t
think I really wrote any decent poems for a number of years.
CP: We’ve talked before about
celebrity, and here and there the subject comes up in your
poems (i.e.--“After a Reading, Charles Bukowski Returns
& Gives Me the Lowdown on Fame, Mutability, the Afterlife,
et al…). The general population basically ignores
the field of poetry; 98% of all poetry is published by independent
presses—in spite of the burgeoning interest in graduate
and undergraduate programs. In your estimation, how
does one go on to “glory” in the field of poetry
in their own lives? Does it have to do with where they
live? Who they know? How they live? Historical
circumstance?
CB:
One of the things I liked about Bukowski is that he didn’t
give a damn about celebrity and would not pull his critical
punches and evaluations (right or wrong) about other people’s
work in order to be well thought of or published or advanced
in some manner. He turned out to be a celebrity of sorts
ironically enough, and alas, not among a lot of people who
read and bought poetry, and not for reasons really connected
with poetry. But he was his own man, did his work—a
lot of which was good—and was not duplicitous.
In the poem you mention, his ghost is giving me advice to
that effect.
As for “Glory,”
I’ve never entertained the notion. I learned early
on there was little consistent correlation between good work
and awards and notoriety. In Life Studies, Lowell begins
“Words for Hart Crane” thus: “When the Pulitzers
showered on some dope/ or screw . . .” And I think
that is the situation as often as not. I’ve seen
a number of poets of my generation go head-long in the direction
of ambition, network, flatter, praise and schmooze, and in
fact get where they want to go. I know just as many
exceptional poets who are completely overlooked as they engage
in none of that. Poets are no different from any other
group of people—who you know helps; how you make deals
has effect. William Carlos Williams said that a successful
poet is one who writes a successful poem. Amen.
If you have good work and work hard and long, you will get
something—probably nothing in line with the effort and
product you’ve put out, but enough will get to you that
you will be able to survive and get along.
Glory is luck, Karma,
personality, and to my view, only occasionally genius.
A friend way back in the day, who knew a famous poet judging
the National Poetry Series, told me that an early book of
mine lost out being selected on a coin flip. A good
example is Larry Levis, one of the great poets of the late
20th century. Try to find his work in either the Norton
or Houghton Mifflin big anthologies that define contemporary
poetry.There are hustlers and courtiers in every walk of life,
and then there are those with only the work. You just
can’t go into it for Glory, not unless it seems you
are willing to get up early every morning and hit the road
to do a lot of “selling.” But for all the
ambition and ego extant, people like Stanley Kunitz come along,
and I loved the fact that Ted Kooser was the Poet Laureate.
CP:
You taught in Pennsylvania for nine years, but most of your
life has been spent in your native California. California—and
perhaps the west in general—has its own kind of literary
meccas and publishing industries, but do you think a writer
is at a disadvantage so far removed from New York?
CB: Yes, of course. Certainly
if you are someone who wants to see and be seen and shake
hands with the famous writers and editors. One of the
only bonuses of being exiled to Pennsylvania for that time—other
than a group of wonderful student poets I had—was that
I was close to NYC and could drive up for events. I
went up a number of times to see Bill Matthews, who although
a celebrity of sorts, was one of the most democratic people
in poetry I have met. His friends were his friends and
you did not have to be famous. Still, had I not been
close, I would not have been able to establish that friendship,
one of the things I have most valued in poetry. However,
going up to NYC never helped my career. You have to
be willing to work at meeting and greeting and getting to
know who is who and it’s hard at any level, it seems
to me, to get into the game. One of my favorite lines
comes from the film Atlantic City —“We don’t
do business with people we don’t do business with.”
CP: Gerald Stern says in a recent interview
in Willow Springs (Issue 56), “What the hell is a poet
doing in a university?” Also, in a recent interview
with the Academy of American Poets, W.S. Merwin says that
although he has nothing against it, and, in fact, has many
friends who are in the academy, that he knew from a fairly
early point in his career that the teaching life was not for
him. What do you make of the industry opportunities
culturally, and how does this correlate or contrast with your
own life experiences?
CB: I did not see the interview you
mention. There is no one in poetry I love more than
Jerry Stern—he and his poetry are wonderful and generous.
He is a dynamo of love and brilliance and humanity.
Perhaps he was saying that it is ridiculous that poets feel
they have to be teachers, that there are not other occupations,
means of support for poets, for all artists, in this country.
Certainly, given the climate in the U.S. going back to Reagan
and Jesse Helms and now George Bush the II, we see an institutionalized
disregard for the arts. The yearly budget for military
bands exceeded the budget for the NEA at its height.
But no, I do not find
it absurd that so many writers are teachers, for in large
part, it would seem that their interests lie in reading and
discussing literature. Merwin had a number of tutoring
jobs, and why compare anyone’s life to Merwin’s?
He is the exception on so many levels. Fifty years ago,
the basic writing course that keeps many English Departments
afloat now were not taught in the university. Many writers
out of grad school end up teaching basic writing for years
to make ends meet. I taught composition for fourteen
or fifteen years. Absolutely nothing wrong with that,
or with teaching the new ranks of creative writing courses,
if you want to be a teacher and are good at teaching.
For myself, that was always my vocation. I was teaching
long before I was even writing bad poems. Certainly,
it is better that we have writers teaching creative writing
than literature professors who just decide it might be an
enjoyable class to teach. There was a lot of that around
in small colleges and universities in the 1980s and 1990s.
Additionally, I have found that writers teaching literature
courses are generally interested in teaching the book, the
text, and do not teach some overlay of theory; one way deals
with the literature and the other deals with a recently manufactured
academic industry much more interested in its own tenants
than in the literature it purports to be dealing with.
English departments in general take the theoretical approach,
so I think it is good, whenever possible, to have a writer
teaching literature so that the students’ initial exposure
is to the primary text.
CP: “Poetry makes nothing happen,”
W.H. Auden famously commented. As a poet who seems constantly
concerned, if not downright obsessed with, existential meaning
both as a writer and a human being in the face of the ineffable
mysteries of existence, to what extent do you agree or disagree
with this statement? And, in context to the current
Iraq war, of which we’re now in the third year, do you
feel that poets as the typical cultural subversives they often
are, ought to be writing against it—or at least about
it? If we don’t are the poets not “making
verse while Rome burns”? You also mention in the
latest APR that , “You can move from one side to the
other, if you maintain your focus, the ideas and subjects
that obsess you.” In these troubling times we
find ourselves in, how does one maintain focus? How
do you?
CB: There’s no argument with
Auden’s comment. It seems generally true and certainly
true in the United States. There are countries where
poetry matters a lot more and where it can motivate people
to action, but not many and not very large countries.
And you can go to jail for your poems—Hikmet in Turkey,
a number of poets in Slovenia under the old Belgrade rule;
Vallejo and Neruda had to leave their countries and go to
Europe. Always there are the problems of political boilerplate,
cant, propaganda, cliché and predictability in political
poetry. But I recall a number of strong poems written
during the Vietnam war, foremost Robert Bly’s “The
Teeth Mother Naked At Last,” yet strangely today in
Bly’s selected poems the most forceful and strident
lines of that poem have gone missing. And perhaps the poetry
of the time helped finally pull us out of the war, but the
level of political engagement in the 1960s hasn’t been
seen since. But I think political poetry is a good thing;
all it has to be is well-written and authentic. Look at Philip
Levine’s poetry that takes up the Spanish Civil War,
years after the fact. Is it simply the facts of the
war—the fascists under Franco oppressing and killing
the supporters of the Republic that make the poetry good?
Of course not. And of course Levine was not there at
the time, though he has lived in Spain and talked with the
people, read the great Spanish poets and researched the lives.
No, it is fundamentally Levine’s character and concerns
for human dignity and a modicum of justice for everyone that
lifts those poems beyond their poignant details. Why
write about that war after the fact? The answer is to
do the right thing by your conscience and soul, to raise one
more voice—a damn powerful and elegant voice—against
fascism in general. Franco is dead, but fascism is still
here.
The older I become, the more I feel like
engaging the political and social in poetry, and so I do.
Do I think anything will happen as a result of my poem?
Certainly not. We are almost in every case preaching
to the choir. And absolutely, no one should be telling
anyone else what he or she should write about. So I
would not say we should or anyone should be writing about
the Iraq war. A poet chooses his/her larger themes,
subjects, and vehicles for the poetry. If you know something
or experience something that will constitute a fresh and compelling
view of that war then you should write it, obviously.
If you do not engage the immediate political situation in
your work, you are not less of a poet.
In that little essay in APR, talking about
moving from one side to the other, I was speaking about forms
and styles, pointing out that a poet, someone as adept and
excellent as Mark Jarman, can write sonnets or prose poems,
the form doesn’t define the poet or the excellence of
the human project/inquiry.
In the introduction, “Reflections,”
to his Collected Poems—among many true and marvelous
things—Stanley Kunitz writes: “Sometimes I feel
ashamed that I’ve written so few poems on political
themes, on the causes that agitate me. But then I remind
myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate
is in itself a political action.”
CP:
You’ve been writing and publishing poetry for roughly
the past three decades. Interestingly enough, in recent
years you seem to have become especially prolific. Since
1998 you’ve published four collections of verse: Fall
From Grace, Star Apocrypha, Sky, and now, And the Sea, as
well as two memoirs. What keeps you going both in basic
drive and energy, but also tapped in creatively?
CB:
Well, first off, I don’t see myself as prolific at all.
During much of the school year, it’s difficult to get
many poems. It’s a simple process of doing what
you like to do when you can find the time. The real
answer to the appearance of being prolific started when I
first started to write. By the time my first book was
accepted and published, a couple of years had gone by and
I was well into the second book. The second book especially
backed up the dates so to speak. I kept sending it out
to contests; it kept coming close; years went by. I
finally went back to the publisher of my first book, Ithaca
House, and bless them, they were happy to print it.
So there is a backlog that goes way back. It may look
like I just crank out a book every two years, but I’ve
been working on them much longer than that. Sometimes,
it’s taken five or six years for a book to get into
print. During such a span, you ought to be able to write
another book if that’s what you want to do. I don’t
have children. I have two cats and cats sleep seventeen
hours a day. Still, it is difficult to find those long
blocks of time that produce the best work. I’m
years behind on my reading now. One thing that keeps
me going is the inspiration of my favorite poets— Levine,
Stern, Levis, Charles Wright, Milosz, Szymborska, Vallejo,
Neruda, Mary Oliver, Kunitz, Stafford, to just mention the
senior poets or those no longer with us; the other inspiration
is my students—I have been blessed with many fine young
poetry students and the teaching keeps you engaged in your
art. You may not have as much time to sit and look out
the window as you feel you need, but you are reading and responding
to poetry and ideas about the writing and working of poetry
and that keeps you vital, suggests ideas to you. Always,
I have been trying to make sense of my life, of mortality,
the possibility of a metaphysical construct, and those concerns
keep me working. Generally, if I can find the time,
I can find the poems.
CP: You’ve recently written that
you feel very much like the poet Peter Everwine in terms of
discussing/writing about your poems, who says, in The New
Naked Poetry that he has nothing against prose which discusses
the subject of poetry, but it “is not likely to very
interesting unless one has either passionate opinions or radical
approaches.” I suppose you must have mixed emotions
about doing interviews related to your work. Do you
find interviews such as these just another way that writers
today have to do their own PR? What are you most interested
in discussing related to your work? What are you passionate
about related to your approaches?
CB:
Well, I’m not near as modest and reticent as my friend
Peter Everwine, a great poet whose work I admire immensely.
It is difficult to get Peter to take a compliment and/or talk
about his own work, but he certainly has the poems and he
is eloquent completely when talking about poetry. I
was referring to that APR essay, a regular feature Steve Berg
runs in there which I like a lot, “The Poet on the Poem.”
I felt a little awkward talking about my own poem, so I talked
mostly about the background of my writing in general.
I have not done that many interviews and am grateful for this
or any attention. There are some poets who have been
interviewed to death and I know they must dread the next request.
But if someone has any interest in the work to date, I am
happy to say what I can about it.
As for what obsesses me
about my approach, as I have said elsewhere, I have no theory,
no manifesto. I like so many different poets and poetry—I
like especially the honesty and directness of Milosz, Hikmet,
Syzmborska, Bukowski, Frank O’Hara, Mary Oliver, Gerald
Stern, Amichai, as well as the other side of coin—Charles
Wright, Justice, Pessoa, Vallejo, Neruda, Alberti, Lorca,
and Luis Cernuda. I care about Voice. It is the
one thing that will convince me of the authenticity of the
emotion or vision. I want my Voice to be mine alone;
I want a clear music and invention at the level of phrasing
and image making, but there’s little new there.
More and more, I want my work to be direct and accessible
in its complaint or in its praise. It has always seemed
to me that poems must have human meaning, must make it, must
earn it. I am long past worrying about style, current
trends and their attendant celebrations. I am simply
trying to work out to my mind what our place here on the earth
might mean. We don’t have all that long to figure
it out.
CP: I know you have strong feelings
related to what has occurred over the past twenty years related
to academic theorists telling writers that they don’t
really matter or know what they’re doing. You’ve
also said before that in your 20s and 30s you had no theory
about what poetry should do or be. As one “against
theory” what sort of vision or theory would you say
you have or have had since then?
CB: Not surprisingly, Stanley Kunitz
says it best for me: “Years ago I came to the realization
that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the
awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace
such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole—that
is the consummation of the endeavor of art. . . . I
never tire of bird-song and sky and weather. I want
to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare.
I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through
and see the world.”
Now of course my poems are not nearly so
purely spoken as those of Kunitz, and any prose explanation
I give of my aims will fall short in practice and in the phrasing
of what he has had to say. But for a goal, a sight for
my aspirations, I find his views to be a fine guiding light.
CP:Your
poetry, for all its metaphysical dimensions, seems to have
a deeply personal quality too. Ironically, not many
of them are about people close to you. In fact, the
main character I think about related to your family that you
have written about is your father. I wonder if you have
any thoughts on how you manage this personal dimension to
your writing while focusing on otherwise abstract subjects?
Or, if you even agree with this?
CB:
My first couple of books, like most beginning writers’
books, took up the subjects and lives of people and family
close to me. Since then, as you point out, there has
only been a little about my father, by way of complaint and
ironic circumstance. Some years ago, when I was somewhat
stuck about which way to turn to make some more meaningful
move in the work—probably in my early 1940s—Jerry
Stern and his poems rescued me. The risk and willingness
to use yourself, to give yourself over to your obsessions
and see where they might lead you, gave me the confidence
to just investigate who I was and what I thought I was up
to, and so, in one sense, to have the poems be more personal.
At the same time we were done with confessionalism in the
late 1960s, so that could not be all of it. So it had
to be the details, the reasoning from the specific that would
open up the larger box of metaphysics. And you had to,
it seemed to me, be honest and go back and forth between doubt
and hope as subjects presented themselves.
I was born in California
and grew up in Santa Barbara/Montecito in the 1950s and 1960s.
As a child, I could walk out my door and find the natural
world—creeks, woods, hills, long and empty beaches.
I was blessed. Southern California then had more trees
than cars. Like all Edens, it is lost. The older
I become, the more my work then turns toward that transcendent
time and place. I am not exactly original in this focus.
My metaphysics is sourced in the natural, everyday world.
I try to work out the day to day struggles as well as formulate
arguments for my poetry that will take up the rush of experience,
mortality, the physical world. I go back and forth taking
different sides of the argument, hoping for transcendence.
The light of this world must surely be the light of the other?
Either way, we’re lucky to be in the world and my poems
hope to celebrate that. My poetry then often centers
itself along the sea, the beaches where I spent so much unconscious
time simply observing the shining all around me. My
intent is that natural images and information work with the
lyric speculation, that a physical influence might lead to
a metaphysical belief.
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