by Shawna Rodenberg

Sam Witt's first book of poetry, Everlasting Quail, won the Katherine Nason Bakeless First Book Prize in 2000, sponsored by Breadloaf, and was published by UPNE the following year, at which time Witt received a Fulbright Fellowship to live and write in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Witt has participated in poetry festivals at Druskininkai and Vilnius at the invitation of the Lithuanian government; he has been a resident at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference and at Yaddo; and his poems have been published in Virginia Quarterly, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Fence, and New England Review, among other journals. His second book, Sunflower Brother, won the Cleveland State University Press Open Book competition for 2006. Witt is currently looking for a publisher for his new manuscript, Occupation: Dreamland, while serving as a visiting assistant professor of English at Whitman College.

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Shawna Rodenberg: Can you speak to your personal evolution as a writer? What background/life experiences bear relevance to your literary development?

Sam Witt: It is awfully difficult to pinpoint such a genealogy, but I can definitely trace back my sensitivity to language and my prototypical nature as an artist to two things; first, my mother read to me as a child. This placed not just language and books at the center of my budding sensibility, but in a very literal way, it caused me to hear what it is about language that is pleasurable and powerful. In addition, even as a little boy, my father had a way of teasing me with puns, jokes, and the like; he loved wordplay and both my parents had a natural facility for language which I was eager to parrot. It stressed not just the powers and subtleties that attend language, but how pleasure was the keen instrument of that power. I trace the second lineage to a strong sense of justice, or injustice, more often, whether it was over the size of a scoop of vanilla ice-cream in a glass of ginger ale, or whether or not I’d been forced to accept the smudged Reese’s cup rather than my brother: I was achingly aware of how unfair the world could be, and I was on the side of the injured.

This quickly grew into a sense of compassion that could manifest itself in odd, sometimes scary ways, not just having to do with the usual childish concerns, who was being left out of what and who was being teased and so on, but the kind of frank empathy that can shatter a child’s sense of safety and equilibrium. An example of this might strike one as macabre, but here goes: as I grew into adolescence, I recall being absolutely obsessed with the first grandmother North Carolina executed. Her name was Velma Margie Barfield, and I remember to this day what she was buried in: a grey pantsuit. Isn’t that odd? I even had this little song I had invented out of her name, with which I would torment my mother, and I recall lying awake at night and wondering what it would be like to have the entire world against you, to be alone in the enormity of such hideous acts—she’d been a nurse who had poisoned her patients after fixing their wills—and I just couldn’t stop imagining a scenario in which everybody wanted you dead and you’d know the exact hour of your death. It was chilling and it haunted me, not that I was insensitive to the sorrow of her victims; I just had a bizarre affinity for the guilty.

What began as a dreamer’s temperament quickly turned into a mind that was ill at ease in the world and only at home inside of books. I also trace to this time my first feelings of desperation, sadness, hopelessness, and so on, the beginnings of a depressive tendency that is most likely worse in others, but with which I nonetheless still struggle. The only cure for it seemed to be to read myself out of it, and once I began to idolize certain rock stars and fashion myself after them—John Lennon and Jim Morrison come to mind—the dots just sort of connected and that sense of sadness, isolating compassion, that sensitivity to language, all of it seemed to fall together and I felt long ago sorted out for something different than what was expected. This rich inner life was turning into small, desperate acts of creation. I’m not like other people, I’d think, especially as an adolescent, and I went through a long list of potential roles for myself: painter, because my brother was an excellent artist; an Olympic gymnast, because I was on a gymnastics team; a great novelist, a rock star, and on, and on. I remember at this time that I had already begun to read poetry in my English classes—William Blake stood out to me, and I kept on the look out for angels in the trees, though they never turned up—and once I’d exhausted this long list of potential identities and realized I had no skill as a musician and I was too big to be a gymnast and that painting was my brother’s thing, all the time there was this little voice in my head: If those other things don’t work out, it said, I can always be a poet. And I am struck now that I never imagined myself to be a great poet; it’s significant to me that I never expected anything back from it. If nothing else, you can always be a poet.

I began writing poetry at the Duke Young Writers’ Camp, and I credit my early development with two people, David Kellogg, my teacher at Duke, and the poet who taught at Wake Forest University to whom he introduced me, Robert Hedin, who is still the best poetry teacher I have ever had. Not that Bert didn’t have some serious competition once I got to the University of Virginia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: Rita Dove, Charles Wright, George Garrett, Gregory Orr—then Jorie Graham, Jim Galvin, Marvin Bell and Gerald Stern. I began to publish while I was in the workshop, almost right away, and it just kind of grew from there, though that leaves out lots of individual struggles, tragedies, heartbreaks, triumphs, friendships, and so on, that helped me and with which I wrestled along the way. And I must credit a couple of friends I made at Iowa: DA Powell, Anthony McCann, John Casteen, all of whom taught me a great deal. There were many many others, too many to name here, but the point is that I count my poems by how many relationships went into them, by the experience that created them, and by the hours of work and contemplation and reading that made them possible.

SR: Which poetic traditions (or specific poets), if any, do you feel most influenced by?

SW: Here’s a rather long list: The Romantics, especially Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—I recall being on a cruise liner in the Greek Isles and seeing a little poster for some kind of poetry festival; there was a little engraving of Shelley’s torso, ruffles and curls and all, and the following line beneath it: “Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight!” And that’s when I began to read the Romantics, as if I had known them all along; that lead to the Transcendentalists, especially Walt Whitman. I just fell into his long lines, as if they had cast a hook right into my heart and were tugging it back in time to the world of the Civil War and leaves of throwaway from an industrial print shop, or leaves of grass, as they came to be known. Emily Dickinson was an early and a huge influence, along with Pound, Browning, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, on into my love affair with the Modernists, with TS Eliot especially—I remember reading “The Waste Land” as a teenager on a Friday night, and how shocked my parents and their friends were, but it was “Journey of the Magi” that first got me, especially the line, “A cold coming we had of it,” though I don’t know why. Then for many years it was all novels, William Faulkner especially, but also Hemingway, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and on, and on. I developed a fast affinity for John Donne and the other Metaphysical Poets, who seemed to provide yet another missing piece of me, and there began to stir in me the beginnings of a hunger that will never be sated, that is, the desire to read everything. And then the liberating and terrifying attempts to outdo them, all of which have failed. Those began at this time as well. The list of acceptable poets to read and be influenced by grew under Bert’s tutelage to include some contemporary writers: James Wright, Stanley Plumly, Charles Wright, John Ashbery, James Tate, Richard Eberhart, Robert Penn Warren, the list grew and continues to grow, and there are too many to name here, especially as I began to read at graduate school and to throw the doors open wide to include the kinds of traditions I had either knowingly discriminated against or merely been too ignorant to know of: the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Mountain poets, certain practitioners of the Language School, the Surrealists, Eastern European and Russian poets, especially the Silver Age poets like Mandelshtam and Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva; one influence lead to another, and it never has stopped.

But I must single out a small list of writers over the others who have been my deities: John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dante Alighieri, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka, James Baldwin. Those are the ones I go down on one knee before. It is a strange list, and there is room for more I suppose, but as it stands right now, they are the ones. Faulkner and Joyce taught me the enormity of language and how to let it sweep over you; I love Kafka because he believed every thought that ever came into his head, which gives me hope; Dostoevsky because he is the greatest thinker of all, Dickinson and Keats for their exceptional ears, Dante because—Oh for Christ’s sake, he’s Dante. Is he the only first name poet? Of course I love the big two, Shakespeare and Milton, but they don’t strike my heart, in the end, with the same minor key.

But I can’t stop here! Let’s see: the Catastrophic School from Poland, especially Herbert and Milosz; and Melville, how could I have forgotten Moby Dick, the greatest poem in novel form ever, which leads me to think of Twain, who invented my favorite character in all of fiction, Huck Finn, of course; there’s John Cheever, Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, Carlos Fuentes, Garcia-Marquez, Borges, Graham Greene, Denis Johnson, Nietzsche—and I almost forgot my favorite novel of all, which is Master and Margarita. James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover; Yeats, how could I have forgotten Yeats? George Oppen...Ovid...Homer...Beowulf—I can’t go on without disappearing.

SR: At AWP in NYC, James Tate described his personal experience with writing as slow, deliberate, and all-consuming. How would you describe this process?

SW: As slow, deliberate, and all-consuming. Tate is right. It is an agonizing process, one that I struggle with, fraught with self-doubt, self-loathing, along with delight and egotism and a kind of joy and self-preservation that is both easy to understand and difficult to summon. I dread beginning the act of writing, which often consists of looking at a blank page while half asleep, or putting together the little scraps of notes I have been taking over the course of months, going over them with a fine tooth comb and connecting them. For instance, the poem of mine “Bird of Paradise and Inferno,” which is in my new manuscript, Occupation: Dreamland, and is about 9-11, began when I started writing down little scraps of images, turns of phrase, circumstance, and so on, in the months after that catastrophe. The process continued once I got to St. Petersburg, Russia, in January 2002. Several times, I sat down and tried to put these scraps together, but I could never face it. Finally I returned to New York City with a huge envelope full of these scraps, and I wrote the poem by pulling them out one by one and writing them down on the page.

Then there are the poems that just come out, some of which I almost miss. “Dirge for the White Birds...” for example, began as a rather rough little journal entry I wrote on the train when I was returning to Boston from NYC after my 35th birthday. I wrote it, then forgot about it, then found it to be a nearly intact poem when I happed across it several weeks later, although the material from the Hank Williams song was added in later.

No matter how the poem comes out, either in agonizingly small little pieces—William James once said of his brother’s writing style that he chews off more than he can bite; I tend to chew on things too; sometimes I carry them around in little pieces, sometimes I keep them on the inside, where they can boil—but despite how the poem comes out, whether in agonizingly small pieces, or in a one sheer burst of something new, the act of revision is when the real work gets done. I recall the story about Dylan Thomas revising “Fern Hill” sixty-four times—wait for it—without changing a single word, and though I don’t know if that is true, I know that I have come pretty close to that in some of my own work. I agonize over it; I say it out loud; I memorize small parts of it, though I have a poor memory, and say it to myself as I walk around. I never understood how anybody could hate revision; to me, that’s the fun part. Get down, roll up your sleeves, and fix the jalopy, for Christ’s sake. It’s my family’s insane workaholism showing itself. I can hear my dad’s voice from when I was a kid: “For Christ’s sake son would you do a job? You’re making a dog’s breakfast of it, stoop goop!” Those words, along with a taut fascination for the high shine on a piece of work, even if that surface cuts you, have served me well. They have also made me highly difficult to please, full of anxiety and disappointment as a man. Them’s the breaks.

SR: In “Dirge for the White Birds...” (as well as several of your other poems) you engage in a sort of moving in and out of the poem. In other words, the space between the writer (as well as the reader) and the subject matter is constantly being altered. Can you speak to the necessity of this device with regards to the intimacy and momentum it creates?

SW: The momentum is built out of a strong engagement with a landscape and a strong emotional resonance established with the reader. It makes a strong claim on that reader’s attention, intelligence, and emotional lifeblood. I do tend to revisit similar images or turns of phrase, and to dwell on all dimensions of what might on first glance seem to be the same bit of tension. That’s only because I think our world today moves way too fast, and I think we sometimes miss the complexity of it all. I like poems that are long, engaged, deep, difficult, and not necessarily clever or dazzling on the surface. I have a sense that if I can just stick with something long enough, it will yield up a kind of majesty. I can only get that by abrading away at the surface of reality with language until I reach the next layer of intensity. I agree that the poem in question comes into a kind of deepening focus and breaks that focus by dropping in little pieces of the Hank Williams song, but I don’t agree that I move in and out of it, only that the lyric flight is always an evanescent process. I can only tell you that this was a poem which presented itself to me as a very strong, received vision, one that built in layers outward; if it seems that I am ruminating my way through it, or chewing it to pieces, that’s because of two things: number one, this is how my mind works, and number two, every poem I write is an attempt to regain for a moment what is unrecognizable in the world. I am only interested in new territory when I write, so perhaps that might account for the strange effect you speak of. If the poem is a touch awkward on the surface, that’s because it privileges the expressive over the known. I’d like to point out in closing that I am above all else a highly elegiac poet, one who celebrates the world by pondering what is lost in it; such a poem would necessarily have to be a kind of disappearing act, wouldn’t you agree?