Fictional Poetry Roundtable With Ben Fama, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Rin Johnson, Corina Copp, & Gordon Faylor

I asked some poets to answer one of the following six questions:

How has fiction been affecting your work, lately?

How/why do you create "characters" in poems? 

Can you think of something you'd love to rip off from / imitate / "be inspired by" in a novel you recently read? 

Tell me about a work of fiction that's been important to your poetry? 

What does "fictional poetry" mean? 

What's a better question you'd prefer to be asked? 

Like poets, some answered all six, some seem to have answered one, some wrote me letters saying they were too busy, and some asked me for lunch.

The following answers stopped me in my tracks of making whatever argument I was making. Gordon is right: I don’t want to brand anything as “fictional,” I just wanted to look explicitly at the way characters necessarily emerge. Rin is right: “Characters just show up in poems;” I should have asked these questions in person; reading Orlando is a perfect way to start writing poetry. Jameson is right: sometimes, the “character” in the poem is just a self that “became someone I no longer recognize as myself.” Corina is right: if some of the tools we recognize from fiction appear in poetry (and sometimes, even when they appear in fiction), they have a totally different temporality and structure: “to see what 2 hours feels like,” as Copp quotes Chantal Akerman, rather than to escape for that duration. I’m putting Ben’s answer first, because he offers a really practical way fiction informs poetry: he makes a “taxonomy” of Bolaño’s sentences, imitating their order in paragraphs in his poems.

 

Ben Fama

How has fiction been affecting your work, lately?

I've been working on novels for over three years, and finally developed the one I am going all the way with.

How/why do you create "characters" in poems? 

Characters in poems have little responsibility, we don't need to let them 'stand out' or 'realize themselves' as they might in fiction. At the National Book Awards for fiction I believe a prize-winning author thanked their editor for such a thing. In poetry characters can function as events, they appear and something happens and they cascade into the next affect bloc to synthesis some kind of meaning. I blame my tendencies towards fictional elements in poetry on reading Robert Hass as a very early student of poetry. He'd have vignettes and short phrases. Consider the short opening to his poem “The Yellow Bicycle”:

The woman I love is greedy,
but she refuses greed.
She walks so straightly.
When I ask her what she wants,
she says, "A yellow bicycle."

Can you think of something you'd love to rip off from / imitate / "be inspired by" in a novel you recently read? 

Years ago, reading Bolaño, I tried to map what was happening in the paragraphs of his work I liked so much. I made a taxonomy of sentences. It was inevitably simple: description of scene, the character's reaction, description of environment/weather. Joan Didion does this too but in one sentence and in a less imitable way. I applied this rhythm to the poetry I was generating at the time as an organizing principle. Those poems were all accepted.

Tell me about a work of fiction that's been important to your poetry? 

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. I felt like there was nothing left to do by the time I'd finished reading this novel. I wrote a tweet about it, which I put it in my book as a poem named "The Line of Beauty." It's sort of a riff track. Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment. That really is simply the best title, and my god, that book.

What's a better question you'd prefer to be asked? 

May I agent your manuscript?

 

Jameson Fitzpatrick

In high school, my friends and I had a strong bias against poems in which things happened that had never happened to the poet. I don’t know where we got this idea—not from our teachers, who were always challenging us to consider the possibilities of invention and pointing to the acts of imagination already in our poems. Yes, we’d say, but I imagined that. We were all spinning the stuff our lives into poems: Britta and I wrote about sex and our boyfriends; Sasha wrote about her family and baseball and various former presidents with whom she was obsessed. (Not for nothing, Sasha was the best poet.)

I still mostly write poems about sex and boyfriends—my entire manuscript is about one relationship. What makes the poems work (if they do) was learning how to write about my life in real-time, in the thick of things. In graduate school, it never occurred to me to invent a character because I was so busy trying to keep up with my own drama. (It was a tumultuous relationship.) It’s also possible I was inventing a character as I ordered my life into poems. I was certainly, in my early twenties, suffering from an “unstable self-image,” and perhaps by documenting that instability, precisely, into poems, I was creating a persona that could function as a mirror.

It’s not surprising that some of my favorite fiction is autobiographical, including Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. The novel, which takes place in Vietnam, where she grew up, is a version of her affair at fifteen with an older man. I wanted my book to be like hers: a single narrative about an older lover, driven by feeling, evocation and detailed renderings of specific moments rather than by plot. My approach to the material never changed (though perhaps it will, as no one has offered to publish it), but I changed in relation to it. At a certain point, the person in the poems—who had been me when I wrote them—became someone I no longer recognize as myself. Good for my mental health, difficult for a poet. I no longer have access to those poems the way I once did; I can re-enter them but not touch anything.

 

Rin Johnson

Hi Diana,

Recently fiction has been affecting my work a lot. I used to talk only about me but I'm talking about the me's that there ever are, like the darkest me and the lightest me, like the me that only comes out when I meet someone I really don't like or the me that hates the way they look naked, or the me that is funny, so just the specific me's instead of the whole me and since I am not always that specific me, I guess I make a fake me and so that me is in my poems a lot now.

Characters just show up in poems... like I'll hear someone say something and then it's like oh hey that's a character for another one of my stupid poems.

I really want to rip off the entirety of Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig; it is about a battle of the sexes and the aftermath (women won). She deals with specificity un-specifically and that dance is so cool to me, I want to be that cool.

Re: Fiction that is important to my practice . . . Well I didn't start writing poetry till I read Orlando last summer. This feels weird because of the Orlando that has happened this summer, but that is how it happened and this is a classic moment where I'm sure those people who really fiercely believe in god would say is ordained... others would say it is synchronicity. Anyway, as an evolved "poet" Lydia Davis and Claudia Rankine are very important, I read them over and over again hoping to become their impossible love child (mostly because I am already somebody else's love child).

I don't know what fictional poetry means, Diana; I thought you knew. Maybe fictional poetry is a redundant term and you've trapped me with your Ph.D. . . . D

I don't mind these questions, I just wish you could ask them of me in person, because generally in person, we find ourselves far from any questions and I quite value that about speaking to you.

I would like to know your answers to these questions too, but maybe that is for another column.

<3
Rin

 

Corina Copp

1.
My impulse is to draw whatever I am thinking into a narrative; that is, to make it more legible. The fictive assists a reader, helps her to distinguish whatever given representation of a mind from its author. And not only does the fictive give us a sense of the possible (as in, it's not hiding, not intimating, but by virtue of its being declared fictive or say given a character or denoted appropriately etc., it is imbued with intent to Be something)—wouldn't it also register a poem then as maybe more desiring and also, in time in a different way? As in:

Only insofar as he thinks, and that is insofar as he is Not, according to Valéry, does man—a "He," as Kafka so rightly calls him, and not a "somebody"—in the full actuality of his concrete being, live in this gap between past and future, in this present which is timeless.
—Hannah Arendt

She's referring to this Valéry quote: “At times I think, and at times I am.”

Which separates thinking and being. We all know poems are dealing with time— "writing is an aid to memory" goes the Hejinian or "writing is an aid to forgetting" as Miles Champion I think once said he'd have it. We have a choice as to which and we generally have to make that choice, to write, I think. I guess all I would say then in light of the above, this timelessness that's (potentially) created with the tools of the fiction writer—this giving "life" to—is interesting to me so much as I can generate more and more of it, make a heap of it if you will (wishful thinking)—once you're cognizant of a poem having gaps and leaps and dissonance in time (definitely not dealing in historical time, or the duration of The Long Goodbye as explained by the King’s horses), you can go there to experience time passing—which is nothing new, to make a poem the experience in itself, or to materialize something that was actually FELT in order to stop feeling it, but anyway I think fiction gets us there, or to the nowhere that Valéry points to. And there are fun things to say about character and tone and movement in successive form too, but I'm like armchair/bed philosophizing tonight, and all I mean is my poems are more about the battleground for kinds of time, than about impersonating or acting as movies? Maybe? Acting in poems is another subject quite interesting. Who knows ok love Goodnight xo

2.
Sorry that is not quite it, or it's focusing on time but avoiding the world of thinking or intuition...

I guess it reminded me of Chantal Akerman saying her films were explicitly not like Hollywood in that you can't go to them and experience time in the same way i.e. escape your life for 2 hours (to pass the time) but you go to them to see what 2 hours feels like, which I love. So that would be (thinking traditionally) fiction v poetry right there; but collapsing the two into one achieves another relationship right—mostly it gives a poem such a primary position, as capable of anything—of holding a land of truth next to the "land of pure intellect" but having inherited so much as a form, it is really fighting . . .

3.
Also, this is giving this kind of philosophizing too much credit—a lot of the heaping and antagonism in my work is due to a desire to be scolded, the confusion due to the infinite piling on of sources and reference points then is both earnest (you'd love this movie!) and "asking for it," like if I had the wit, I'd be plain about it but I'd rather simulate reflection . . .

 

Gordon Faylor

How/why do you create "characters" in poems?

I guess this is part and parcel of my overall skepticism re: "fictional poetry," which feels to me like a branding mechanism—but it seems impossible to not include characters in a given text, especially if "character" is defined as a style's relation to subject-hood, or as a means of indexing tensions between plot/narration/context (input) and theme or moral or (non-)use value (output). A text can't not be fed through some-thing. Narratology, poesis, etc. start and have always started with character(s), even when it's only that of a sterilized transcriber.