Sentences Are Not Emotional: An Interview With Diana Hamilton and Jameson Fitzpatrick

I discovered the pleasure of audio books years ago when I was working as a holiday temp for a university, opening mail and logging unofficial transcripts into an online database. I could very easily pass eight hours without speaking to anyone else. I was listening to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho when one of the sentences stopped me in my tracks (not that I was moving very fast): “The solitary life, which Emily had led of late, and the melancholy subjects, on which she had suffered her thoughts to dwell, had rendered her at times sensible to the ‘thick-coming fancies’ of a mind greatly enervated.” 

Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel is a ghost story, and here Emily has been visited by her dead father’s apparition. “Thick-coming fancies” references Shakespeare on Lady Macbeth, and the clauses and turns and extra words and dead ends and contradictions in meaning make something of a lurk through a haunted castle. It’s a juicy sentence! 

When I saw Diana Hamilton and Jameson Fitzpatrick were doing a free course on sentences, my interest bucked. I knew them both as a tremendous writers of prose works within their poems, and wanted to know more about how they were thinking about sentences. I’m also indebted to the Poetry Project, which has centered how I’ve oriented myself towards poetry in New York City for the 12 years since I have lived here. A highlight, featuring many lubricious sentences, is this recording of Dana Ward from nearly 10 years ago, a great writer and reader of his own work.

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Ben Fama: “This workshop is for reading and writing poems that are made up of sentences.” First of all, I want to express my enthusiasm for on-going education and sustainable education models, such as this series the Poetry Project is doing, where someone who wants to get deep into the work but doesn’t have the option of a full-time program gets to do just that. I’m envious of people who have a seat in this class. Can you tell me a bit of how you conceived of it and why it is appropriate for the Poetry Project?

Jameson Fitzpatrick: As I recall, we were taking a walk through Greenwood Cemetery on some weekend afternoon and Diana was telling me about her dream of teaching a free poetry class (or maybe of starting a free poetry school?—remind me, Diana!). I had really been missing teaching poetry, as I teach a full course load of composition classes, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. A few weeks later maybe, I tweeted about this desire, Diana replied citing her original wish and our prior conversation, and then we got an email from the wonderful Executive Director of the Poetry Project, Kyle Dacuyan, asking if we were interested in proposing a workshop. We came up with a premise and then sent our proposal to Laura Henriksen, the Director of Learning & Community Engagement at the Project, and we worked out the details from there.

Diana Hamilton: Yes, we didn’t start with “poems that are made up of sentences;” we started with “we would like to teach a writing class students don’t pay for.” Our first idea was a workshop on Wives (we were in the backyard of Gingers, and I was adamant that “Wives and Sentences” was a good idea). We share a love of sentence-y poems, and we went that direction when I moved on from the matrimonial premise (see Jameson’s Mr. &, Anna Akhmatova’s “He loved three things”—and that #thanksfortyping hashtag on wives’ roles in books’ Acknowledgements).  

The Poetry Project has been offering relatively low-cost workshops for a long time—full tuition for the usual 10-week classes is now $275, and they have some need-based scholarships—but we specifically requested they consider offering one without tuition.

BF: I love that, between Greenwood Cemetery and Gingers’s backyard and the Poetry Project I feel an affinity for a sense of reeling around New York. And before I ask more about the class, could you speak to the relationship you both have with the Poetry Project? I ask because, Diana, I know you have mentioned it as part of your development as a writer?

DH: I emailed the Poetry Project in 2007 asking if they were looking for volunteers or “interns”—I wanted to find out what poets in New York were doing. Corrine Fitzpatrick replied inviting me to the office, and I mistook it for an interview: I showed up awkwardly in Banana Republic’s sales rack. Once there, I could see I had erred—everyone was in poet clothes, of course—and Corrine gave me a tour of the space, noting that I could smoke on the Church’s roof, and then quickly apologized (“You don’t look like someone who smokes.”)

For four hours a week, I helped out in the office (i.e. licking envelopes); I sold books on Monday nights. The first event I “worked” was Anselm Berrigan’s goodbye party. Everyone was extremely nice. It took me many years to realize how silly and earnest and pretentious I must have seemed then, and made me admire Stacy Szymaszek and Corrine and Arlo Quint et al. all the more for never making anyone feel . . . uncredentialed? Stacy invited me and Nicole Wallace (now the Managing Director, then also a volunteer) to curate the 2008-9 Friday Series, which was a very big deal to me at the time. I cried about it.

Before all that, though, I fell in love with the Poetry Project on 12/7/2005 (the day before my birthday) when I went to the launch of Kenneth Koch’s Collected. 

JF: I can’t remember the first time I went to a reading at the Project, but I know I began to go more regularly after taking a class with Eileen Myles (a former director of the Project) in grad school—one evening, in lieu of our usual discussion, they took us to St. Mark’s to see Filip Marinovich’s Wolfman Librarian performance. Among the readings I remember most fondly was, a few years later, the big group reading for the launch of Tim Dlugos’s collected poems.

In 2018, I had the great fortune of working with Stacy Szymaszek, in the final year of her incredible tenure as director, on putting together the Allen Ginsberg Symposium—a weekend of workshops, readings, and talks. (If you missed Alice Notley’s keynote, you can read it online.) I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with her and the rest of the staff on the Symposium, and to have gotten to invite so many poets I admire (including Marinovich and Notley) to participate.

BF: Poetry has appeal to me in that it offers ways that do work outside of sentences, which makes sentence-y poems even more juicy. I love the long dives these kinds of poems do, they sound good to hear, and they accommodate a lot of types of thinking. Can you give us who aren’t in the class a glimpse of what those enrolled are going to be thinking about during the duration of the course?

JF: Part of how we came to the premise (“reading and writing poems that are made up of sentences”) was by recognizing that, despite our very different poetic educations (and sometimes—but not always—diverging tastes as readers), Diana and I both tend to write poems that are themselves made up of sentences (we also happen to love to one another’s poems—Diana’s last book, God Was Right, totally opened up my sense of how it was possible to use and lineate the sentence in poetry). We were, and are, curious about what we have in common—valuing the sentence as a unit—and where we might differ in our conceptions of the sentence, of the line, of the poem, etc. (Not incidentally, we also both work at university writing centers, which tend to produce a lot of thinking about sentences and the many possibilities of syntax.)

DH: We’ve talked a lot about how to notice, categorize, and/or imitate the sentences in poems without reducing poetry to its constituent linguistic parts. For example, in one session, we looked at competing ideas of what a poem “is,” starting with Carl Phillips’s close reading of poems’ syntactic strategies in “Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax.” In this essay, he describes as “erotic” the way poets set up patterns, get you to recognize and become comfortable with them, and then break them; he talks about the meaning produced by subordination (syntactical and otherwise), the timing of grammar, and prosody. Against, this, we read Laura (Riding) Jackson’s description of poetry as a “vacuum,” where she warns that “whenever this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides to destroy it, to convert it into something. The conversion of nothing into something is the task of criticism.” I’m interested in the dangers of making too much of poetry—insisting it become more than it is—but I’m also interested in the way poems work.

BF: I really enjoy teaching, I was apprehensive for years and I have finally realized it as a way to match my ethical aspirations (helping people through self-organized channels, mutual aid through financial support, passing on experience, showing up for people). Can you tell me a bit how teaching informs your own private writing practice, and also how mentorship affects you, in this course and beyond?

JF: At NYU, I teach the required first-year writing course—which is very different from the teaching of poetry. But I certainly think spending the past five years teaching the essay as a form has made my own poetry more essayistic (another thing Diana and I have in common as poets?).

I (of course) love teaching poetry, and wish I had the chance to do so more often, but I am, I’ll admit, a bit wary of mentorship as an educational framework. In my own practice, for instance, I’ve learned just as much from my peers as from the teachers I have, at various points, understood as my mentors. While I’m all for the sharing of knowledge, opportunities, etc., and am wildly grateful for all my teachers have shared with me over the years, I don’t think a hierarchical model of education is the only—or best—way to study poetry. I think it can be difficult (or, I should say, it was difficult for me) to stop writing in the direction of one’s teachers’ styles, values—even subject matter, to a certain extent. As a teacher, my goal is always to try to see every student as the poet they are rather than the poet they could be, and one of my greatest joys is to learn from students whose approaches to poetry might be entirely different from mine.

DH: Jameson is right: we are both more essayistic, as poets, from having taught that form. (Read their forthcoming Pricks in the Tapestry from Birds!)

I also don’t want to overstate the meaningfulness of teaching. For our unit on “Questions,” we read “Failure in Infinitives,” by Bernadette Mayer (another former Project director), where she lists many things she has failed to do. Among them, she lists this "failure to believe in teaching." But she goes on to list something she hasn’t failed to do:

failure
to believe the dictionary & that there is anything
to teach; failure
to teach properly; failure
to believe in teaching
to just think that everybody knows everything
which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure
to see not everyone believes this knowing and
to think we cannot last till the success of knowing

When I remember that Bernadette knows that everyone knows everything, I feel better.