Charlie Clark's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, The Journal, The Laurel Review, Smartish Pace, West Branch, and other journals. He studied poetry at the University of Maryland and lives in Austin, Texas.
His poem "Devil Doing Scales" appears in Issue Thirty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, Charlie Clark talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about form, the devil, and movement between lines.
1. What was the beginnings and endings of writing “Devil Doing Scales”?
This poem is part of a group of poems that explore the devil as a character, or explore a character called the devil. Most of the ideas I get for writing are born out of seeing something in another piece of art that inspires me, confuses me, or for whatever reason sticks with me. In this case, I had been reading Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. It’s just an amazing sequence. Reading it, I was thinking a lot about the sonnet (a form I often go back to), as well as mythic characters and how a sonnet sequence can provide a foundation that frees you up to look at a character or image or idea from different angles and through varying lenses. At the same time I was re-reading Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods, and was once again floored by how he, like Rilke, balances formal consistency with varying tone and perspective. I also had Anne Carson’s work in mind while I started these devil poems. I adore her work, Autobiography of Red in particular. In that book, Carson is playing with a mythic character, but uprooting that character into a contemporary landscape. Weirdly, I read no Milton at all while working on these poems. I kind of liked the idea of a sonnet sequence about the devil that ignores that considerable shadow.
This is all the general background of influence. The specific impetus for this poem, and the sequence of poems from which it comes, was reading Kevin Prufer’s Fallen From a Chariot, and seeing how he uses angels in some of the poems in that book. His angels are mythic creatures but also very physically present—real beings in the real world. I was fascinated by how he navigated that paradox, and, frankly, wanted to steal it. So I went for the flip side of angels: demons. And demons quickly became devils.
“Devil Doing Scales” was one of the earlier poems to come out of this experiment. I came up with the title first, which is not my usual method. Usually titles are hard-earned afterthoughts. With these poems I decided to come up with titles first, and to treat them like propositions. I would play the poem off the title to see what unexpected directions I could make the poem go in. In the case of this poem, the title came quickly, and the first line came almost immediately thereafter.
Let’s see. That’s all about beginnings. As far as endings go, I had everything but the ending finished for quite a while. I just couldn’t nail down how I wanted to exit the poem. So, in that way, writing the end of the poem was the end of my writing of the poem. That’s probably not too uncommon an experience, as good endings are incredibly hard to write. (Coincidentally, Marianne Borouch has an excellent essay on poems’ endings in the most recent New England Review. It is definitely worth reading: http://www.nereview.com/ner-33-2the-end-inside-it-by-marianne-boruch/) I tried out a number of directions for the ending of “Devil Doing Scales,” all false starts. I really wanted to create a contrast between the physicality of playing the piano (poorly)—of the devil character’s fat fingers, for instance—and the supernatural element of a character like the devil. The ethereal quality of music became the hinge from which I was able to move in a successful direction, finally. Music can have a ghostly quality in the way that it is present but not visible or concrete, as well as how, after experiencing it, it can live on so clearly in memory. The ghost that appears at the end there is just a part of the furniture of the imaginative/supernatural space I was occupying at the time. I also enjoy the idea of a ghost getting comfortable with the recent fact of its ghostness, and how that echoes back to the physical limitations of the devil while playing piano.
2. I’m curious about your choice to spread out the lines of this poem with paragraph breaks between each one. This gives the effect of keys on a piano, along with the more obvious emphasis of each line. Could you please talk about this choice of form?
The form is the one I decided upon for the entire sequence, so there wasn’t specific decision-making happening when it came to this particular poem. Generally, though, the idea of the monostich became a part of the generative process for these poems. Prior to writing these poems, I’d been writing a lot of poems with long, long lines, and very convoluted syntax; work that blurred the line between poetry and prose in a very deliberate way. The devil poems were in part a reaction against that. I wanted each line to have a very specific, singular life on the page, whether by containing a complete piece of information, being end-stopped, or something like that. Of course, that never works perfectly, so this poem illustrates a balance, I think, between the enjambment-heavy writing I’ve done in the past and my interest in exploring the structural integrity of the line.
When revising poems, I’ll often separate parts of lines so they have their own space on the page. This way I can focus on the music of a particular portion of the line. After I get something I’m satisfied with, I will stitch the lines back together. Here I wanted to emphasize the line to myself, and to ensure that the emphasis wasn’t diminished. I wanted each line to have its own resonance, and the monostich was a way I thought I could accomplish that.
Also, while this poem is a sonnet, it is loosely a sonnet. I thought that monostichs would help de-emphasize each poem’s sonnetness, so that readers wouldn’t get hung up worrying about the extent to which the poem does or does not satisfy the varying formal requirements of the form. When I say “readers,” I guess I really mean myself. I am often in the camp of readers who, upon discovering that a poem is 14 lines long, has to spend a lot of time tracking all the possible additional formal measures by which the poem might more completely be a sonnet. Does that make sense? I wanted to use the 14-line size of the sonnet, and play around with octets, sestets, couplets, etc., but I didn’t want to blind myself by worrying about those formal components. The monostichs provided a way to work against that, as I don’t recall Petrarch writing in monostichs.
3. You make a really bold move between the title and the first line. The speaker seems to acquiesce that the devil wouldn’t play scales or wasn’t playing scales, but instead, “Chopsticks.” The “fine” that starts the poem is so lovely too: we, as readers, are faced immediately with the poem’s annoyed tone. Could you discuss this move from title to poem, or perhaps how you see titles and poems connecting?
I came up with the titles to the poems in this sequence before I moved on to writing the poems. Sometimes the titles were general, thematic overviews, sometimes they operated like first lines. These relationships between title and poem didn’t reveal themselves until the poems were written. In the case of “Devil Doing Scales,” it turned out that there was an undercutting, contrasting effect in the relationship between the title and the poem’s opening.
The opening line came not long after the title, and appeared pretty much fully formed. I think I messed around for a few minutes with trying to describe the act of doing scales, but got bored with how obvious that would be after reading the title, so I decided to take a different tack. Also, I like the idea of the contrast: scales are practice, “Chopsticks” is fluff, a way to goof off. (I say this as a non-piano player. I could be wrong.) I enjoy the opening gambit of the “Fine,” both for its chatty tone and for how it challenges the title. I’m not sure who the speaker here is, though there is, I think, a bit of the free indirect style in the approach of that “Fine.” The devil would probably prefer to be doing scales, or Chopin, or anything more complex, but he’s limited to “Chopsticks.” So the voice here is a little bothered by what it’s admitting. I can see the devil being upset with that limitation. It’s a part of the humanized character I was interested in exploring. In stories, the devil usually shreds, right? Or can confer the ability to shred upon those who offer up their soul to him. It’s the idea of the devil as all-powerful (to an extent). So I enjoy the fact that he isn’t shredding here.
Thinking about the humanizing impulse: while I wanted this devil to exist without a real moral imperative, I didn’t want to strip him of his supernatural quality. He’s still a kind of corrupting influence.
4. Have you been reading anything that we can cozy up with once fall fully opens up to us?
Well, I never want to let a chance go by without championing the work of David Antin. His talk pieces are amazing. There is very little in common—OK, nothing—between his work and “Devil Doing Scales,” but his influence shows on other work I’ve done. i never knew what time it was was my introduction to his work, and I’ve gone back through most of his books since then. I remain consistently impressed with the level of imaginative and intellectual rigor he displays. These pieces are essentially semi-improvised lectures that he then goes back and edits for publication. But there is always something about the movement or the connections that occur in them that have the texture of poetry. And that he’s doing this without the net of prepared text amazes and horrifies me. There are some great recordings of his work at the PennSound website: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Antin.php. I particularly recommend “War” and “How Wide Was the Frame.”
As far as recent reading goes: some years ago I happened upon a copy of Cid Corman’s translation of René Char’s wartime journal, Leaves of Hypnos. I finally got around to reading it recently. Char led a group of resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation of France. I’m not sure that the book is in print, but I highly recommend seeking it out in libraries or online. It’s an absolutely fascinating book that includes diary entries, aphorisms, sketches of natural observations, as well as some interesting thoughts on leadership during wartime. The closest example I can think of that creates art out of the dreadful tedium of underground resistance is Jean-Pierre Melville’s filmArmy of Shadows. Though Char was in the countryside almost exclusively, not in Paris, so Melville’s movie is more dynamic and sexier as an illustration of that experience.
Jorie Graham’s most recent book, Place, is an intriguing book for me. I keep going back to the poem “On the Virtue of the Dead Tree,” in particular. She channels Whitman in it in interesting and unexpected ways. She is propulsive in her cadence, and yet in order to read her you must read her slowly. That friction is very engaging. Also, she tries to enact a kind of simultaneity in her poems, where the multiplicity of conscious attention is contained at once. I’m not explaining it well. Hers is a seemingly impossible task, and one that I find engaging and enviable.
What else? I’m working my way through Geoff Dyer’s last collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. I was vaguely familiar with him prior to picking up this book, but am eager to go through his whole back catalog now. It’s a fascinating read. The book is arranged according to subject matter. The first section contains his essays on photography. I’ve been reading it for about a month and am still only in that section of the book. I keep re-reading individual sentences and essays over and over again. There’s such a great intelligence at work. It’s always such a thrill to discover a writer whose mind and way of seeing both clicks with something inside you but presents it in a way you’ve never considered or figured out in a conscious way for yourself. That’s happening all over the place in these essays. I’ll give you one quote, about the photography of Edward Burtynsky: “Burtynsky produces images whose beauty is freighted with a political/ecological purpose that is unavoidable and unobtrusive.” The pairing of “unavoidable and unobtrusive” is such a smart analysis of the political content of Burtynsky’s photography. It describes a way of addressing matters that I’d like to strive for in my own writing. Dyer’s book is absolutely littered with these kinds of observations.
I’ve also recently read several of Heidi Julavits’ novels with great enjoyment. Her most recent, The Vanishers, is wonderful. I briefly campaigned on Facebook to have Sofia Coppola buy the film rights for it. That means I annoyed a few friends about this for a couple of days, then moved on to some other distraction. Which isn’t to say that shouldn’t still totally happen. Coppola’s interest in, for lack of a better phrase, women in captivity, is right in line with what’s happening in The Vanishers. Plus, there are psychic attacks! Reading that book alongside her husband Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet is an interesting experience, given they have nominally similar speculative conceits, but explore them in very, very different ways.
5. What other writing-type projects have you been working on?
The sequence of devil poems was the last “project” that I can speak of. Those poems are starting to trickle out here and there: there are devil poems in recent issues of 32 Poems, BODY, and Front Porch. Bellingham Review and Third Coast will each have a devil poem in upcoming issues. It’s gratifying to see them making their way out in the world.
As far as new work goes, I suppose I’m kind of always writing, in fits and starts, but there is no high-concept project happening at the moment. When I go too long without writing, I get antsy; worried that I’m getting out of writing shape, so to speak. My solution is usually to try an ekphrastic descriptive exercise. Describe a piece of art, and discover something about it through the descriptive act of looking. (Geoff Dyer does this amazingly well in the essays I mentioned above.) Because I’ve been pretty busy lately with my regular, non-writing life, and it’s been hard to find time to write, most of what I’ve written has come out of such exercises. Poems that try to be the act of looking. There is an interpretive impulse present in the fact that you are rendering something visual in words, and it’s fun to move between resisting and surrendering to that impulse.
Also, occasionally, a word or phrase in the media will catch my attention. There were these apocalyptically terrible wild fires here in Texas last fall, and somewhere along the way I heard someone mention, or somewhere read about, an Indian named Buffalo Hump who had burned up portions of Texas in the late nineteenth century when the state was still being settled. Researching that name became a way into writing about the fires. Or, Emperor Diocletian, about whom I knew nothing, got some mention a few months ago. It was in relation to a tiff between Paul Krugman and Ron Paul. I knew nothing about Emperor Diocletian, so I googled him. It turns out he was Roman Emperor in the late 3rd to early 4th century, and famously issued something called the Edict on Maximum prices in a failed attempt to stop inflation. I don’t remember the exact context that Krugman and Ron Paul mentioned him, but it’s a salient subject given all the national and international worry about inflation and economic growth. That happens sometimes, and these random bits of information can turn into the trigger for a poem, something to try to make sense out of. Or confusion out of. The minutiae of history or political commentary can make for most engaging fodder.