Moments of Explosion: An Interview With Lily Brown

Weston Cutter and Lily Brown engage in a conversation on poetics, rooted primarily in the work and ideas of Wallace Stevens, over at the Kenyon Review Blog.

Here's a lead-off:

WC: The biggest/easiest questions to start with are 1) how’d you first experience Stevens’ stuff (you mentioned a class: had you read him before? What poem was it that blew yr mind open?), and 2) how you find him generatively/artistically useful. Certainly he writes gorgeous stuff, and that’s great, but how’s his work helped you in your own work? I’ll certainly answer along the same lines, or take this in whatever direction you want, but I’m real curious to read young writers talking about the guy—he seems massively important at present.

LB: I think I first encountered Stevens in high school, though I don’t remember his work making much of an impression on me. My guess is that I read “Sunday Morning,” wasn’t inspired—I’m still not inspired by that poem—and moved on to other poets. At that point, I was sneaking around in the library at my school pulling Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath books off the shelves, so it could be that I just wasn’t ready for Stevens, as it were. Then about ten years later, when I was getting an M.F.A., I took a three-week intensive course on Stevens with Graham Foust, and it was in that class that his work “blew my mind open,” as you put it (or took the top of my head off, as Dickinson put it). At first, I remember feeling totally unable to enter into the work. I felt this way particularly on a day when we were reading “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but I think it was during that class discussion that something shifted. I started to see the sections of the poem more as gestures towards—for lack of a better word—meaning, and finding meaning in the way parts relate to each other (“inflections” and “innuendos,” or “a man and a woman,” for example). As I remember discussing in class, no specific bird called a blackbird exists. A blackbird isn’t a species of bird, in other words, but rather Stevens’ creation, used as if it were a species-name, like sparrow, or wren. What I’m trying to say is this: the figure of the blackbird is moving, to me, for the way its faux-specificity belies its metaphoric qualities as a vehicle for seeking meaning, for seeking to understand the relationship between things in the world, or for seeking knowledge in the everyday. The blackbird becomes, for the speaker, “involved / In what I know.” In this way, the word “blackbird” is actually perfect because it seems specific, but isn’t—a blackbird could be a crow, a raven, or any number of other birds. But the unspecific name matches the gesture-like sections, which move not hierarchically, but as if inhabiting the same plane, each one equally as important as the others, with the blackbird as a mediating presence.

In terms of how Stevens is “generatively/artistically useful” to me, I think there are a number of elements that are generative in his work. Some of the most important elements I see as artistically helpful are the following: an emphasis on between-ness, emotional restraint countered by moments of explosion, and the balance between tradition and experiment. I just named three categories that all involve a balance between two poles, and perhaps that’s the most important thing to me about Stevens. Poetry, for me, is pretty much always about making some combination, through expression or representation, of interior and exterior experience, of finding a balance between the two. So what I might find in Stevens is permission to work with that idea always in mind. His time-spanning obsessions, primarily the imagination and reality, make me feel like whatever I happen to be obsessed with is OK, and like I can keep trying to work out how best to make poems that come as close to the complicated human experience of negotiating interior and exterior as possible. And speaking of “human,” there’s an emotional restraint in Stevens’ poems that consistently moves me (this might be most evident for me in his overwhelming use of the impersonal pronoun “one” instead of the personal “I”). That restraint feels profoundly human, the tug between wanting to share one’s experience, and feeling exposed by that sharing. I love the moments when things bust open, too, as in the epigraph from Stevens in my book, from the poem “United Dames of America”: “There are not leaves enough to crown, / To cover, to crown, to cover—let it go—…” There’s this sense here that the poet becomes frustrated by the rut he gets into while writing, and that his frustration is imported directly into the poem as he admonishes himself to “let it go.” I love this moment of interruption or eruption, where the poem becomes less “poem-y” and more intimate because the poet’s thought process is inscribed into the poem.

The rest is available here.

A review of Rust Or Go Missing is available here.

And you can here Lily reading here.