CJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press, 2012) and a chapbook, The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series. He is the recipient of the 2013 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and his work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, and Massachusetts Review. He's the editor of Two Lines Press and a contributing editor for Tin House.
His poems, "The Wing's Lesson," "Inquiry into Owls," and "Inquiry into Beckoning," appear in Issue Fifty of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about lofty words, questions (or lack thereof), and looking at a windmill.
Could you tell us about your process of writing “The Wing’s Lesson”?
The germ of “The Wing’s Lesson” was A. R. Ammons’s poem “The City Limits”. And—this happens sometimes after reading a poem—trying to get away with using a lofty word he used, “radiance,” in a poem of my own. I put radiance on a page and wrote around it for a few months. Ultimately, though, when Ammons says, “when you consider / that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen, / each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then / the heart moves roomier,” he’s getting a feeling from light that’s foreign to me. I mostly see light as screens at night, the ungodly bright bus interior, nonstop cable news.
To me, transcendence (that radiance) is a low-light affair—on a porch, under a dim incandescent bulb. It’s generally a pretty ‘simple’ poem, but I was trying to get to a breathlessness then ease it with that “millions and millions” at the end. An escape (transcendence?) into something wilder, but less quick.
Your two inquiry poems were interesting to me, because I expected some sort of question in the text, or a hint of a question, but there were no questions! Is it ironic to be asking questions about the lack of questions in two poems about inquiries? Could you talk about inquiries and how you see the question functioning and not functioning in your poems?
The Inquiry poems are part of a series I began writing when my wife and I got married. In them, I was thinking more of scientific inquiry—the positing of a theory then attempting to find a proof. To be a good scientist you have to be able to absolutely commit to your theory, but when it’s proven wrong to your satisfaction, abandon it without a second thought. That seems a lot like marriage to me. Because I’m not sure “because of all of life is only once, but it glows” is really an answer to anything, but it’s certainly a theory of why my wife ignoring me while combing her hair could be so beckoning. Is that an adequate answer to a question about questions without questions?
In “The Wing’s Lesson,” you write, “Pull up your coverlet to conceal / the invading volume of the modern.” Indeed, in your other poems, you focus on the images that reside in and around nature: “the dead fish,” “the arctic night / or the mimic octopus.” Could you talk about how you see these images working in your poetry? Are you often working to reject “the invading volume of the modern?”
I don’t fetishize being a luddite, but I do try to be wary of anything too easy. I really like that my Iphone has all my music and maps on it, I know about the mimic octopus from youtube, I enjoy twitter and facebook and all that shit, but I don’t think anybody on their deathbed is going to wish they spent more time playing Candy Crush. (Oh shit, I hope not—could… could I be wrong?) I get annoyed, sometimes, about the value these things are given in our culture. I think we should let ourselves be better than US Weekly thinks we are. Again, I think all of that stuff has its place and time, but I’d just rather go see a windmill.
What’s on your 2014 reading list?
I’m moving to France in a couple of months on the Amy Lowell Scholarship, so my plan for 2014 is to mostly read contemporary French poets, but I’m packing Beast by Frances Justine Post in my carry-on. Bianca Stone’s Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is one I’m looking forward to. Lately I’ve also been revisiting Lorine Neidecker and early Susan Howe. William Gass’s On Being Blue. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I would love for someone to buy me the full run of Cahiers from Sylph editions. There are so many great chapbook presses, and I’ll stock up at AWP: Poor Claudia, New Michigan, UDP, Greying Ghost, Horse Less Press, Dancing Girl, Little Red Leaves, etc.
What else have you been writing recently?
Just poems. I was working on the Inquiry series, but I think that finished itself, so just poems right now for my second book.