Kevin Prufer’s newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Among his eight other books are Churches, which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them, which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Paris Review, and The New Republic, among others. He is Professor of English at The University of Houston, where he also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long-forgotten authors. He also teaches at the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA Program.
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Keith Kopka: Classical history is a controlling conceit throughout The Fears. The book is filled with poems that evoke scenes of emperors and famous battles of antiquity. However, the poems never feel mired in the past. Instead, the past seems more like a tool for the speaker to begin to reckon with the fact that their present will soon be antiquity. Often, when poets use historical references in poems, they risk retreading well-worn territory or alienating their readers by burying their arguments in academic references. But your work makes the historical elements feel fresh and necessary without placing the burden of historical knowledge on the reader. What drew you to use this historical context as an organizing force for the book? Was it a way to order larger, more abstract ideas against a more tangible historical backdrop, or was it something else? And how did you find a balance between presenting historical knowledge to readers with clarity while also trusting them in order to avoid reportage and cliché?
Kevin Prufer: That’s a big question. And I’m glad you think readers don’t really have to know a lot about classical history to understand the book. That’s important to me. I wanted to write a book in which readers wouldn’t feel compelled to go look up information about Diocletian or Galba to understand the poems, but at the same time, trust that the speakers in the poems were confident in their own knowledge of those and other figures.
I think the best way to get at the question of history in this book is to describe a very strange thing that happened to me about twenty-five years ago.
I was sitting on a park bench among the ruins of the Roman baths in Bath, England. I had no particular interest then in Classical history, but the bathhouse seemed like a good place to visit while I was in town.
The ancient bath—the size of a small swimming pool—had once been at street level, though centuries of litter and roadwork had raised the street about twenty feet. So I had descended into the bath and, above me, I could see open sky. I remember looking at the pedestals circling the bath and wondering about the statues that must once have stood on them. And I could hear water running through the ancient lead pipes the Romans had set into the ground two thousand years earlier.
Then a very strange thing happened. I felt as if time had stopped completely, or as if I had been transported backward in time. I’m not a particularly mystical or spiritual person and nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Time seemed to stop, even as tourists, who seemed diaphanous, moved among the ruins. Part of me seemed aware of the present moment, but another part of me felt hurled into the distant past, or into some urgent and involuntary attempt to understand something of the distant past that was always going to be elusive. When I finally rose from the bench, I had become in certain ways different.
I had a new relationship with time—with how it passes, with how one time is connected to another. It’s very hard to describe, but the connections between the ancient past and the political present seemed abruptly infinite and complex and I knew that the only way I could understand my own time was by understanding ancient times, their histories and cultures. And the more I read, the more familiar and foreign those ancient cultures seemed to me, in their understanding of citizenship, ethics, death, and the divine.
It was the foreignness of the ancient Roman mind that excited me the most—that sense of almost connecting with writers of the distant past, except that their minds were fundamentally unreachable, different, alien.
For years, I’m afraid I made myself obnoxious to people in my obsession with moving my consciousness back to a consciousness I could never actually inhabit. I would lie in bed at night and try to recreate ancient streets, the noise and smells. It was not an obsession with emperors and battles, but with mind and mindset and setting and the movements of time.
It’s the echoes of that obsession that you’re seeing in these poems, a continuing effort to understand the present through a past that is both strange and weirdly familiar.
KK: Speaking of this movement through time, thematically, The Fears also seems to be interested in how people are remembered. These poems pay close attention to the idea of legacy in its historical and cultural contexts and its more personal realms of family, romantic relationships, and artistic output. The result is an incredibly moving meditation on mortality and the ways in which we all struggle to leave our mark on the world. Can you speak to how you view the tension between the ideas of mortality and legacy within the collection?
KP: Well, I didn’t know I was writing a book about mortality and legacy until I finished it. I write poems one by one, without thinking about how they might be connected. And somehow at the end of a few years, they cohere into a book. It’s only then that I understand what my concerns have been. So there’s no large, consistent argument about the meaning of loss or annihilation in the book, but many related thoughts and often competing ideas—ideas that have been competing for my attention in my day-to-day life.
When I had the manuscript spread out on the floor, trying to arrange the poems into a hopefully coherent collection, I, too, began to notice how so many of the speakers were concerned about their absence—their absence after they die, their absence before they were born—and that these concerns almost always seemed to find articulation through the performance of various kinds and levels of fear.
I suppose the book is so obsessed with the distant past because speakers who call to us from the past are also, in some ways, calling to us from beyond the grave. And speakers who look into the past for consolation or ideas about the present are also looking into a time when they had no existence, into a time in which they might as well have been dead.
It’s that kind of energy that drives the poems’ thoughts about absence, mortality, and annihilation. The vastness of history seems to me to be another annihilation of the self.
KK: Although classical history is a central element of the collection, there are poems, especially later in the book, that are clearly interested in our contemporary culture and our current, often alienating, political climate. In what ways do you hope these poems with more modern themes will benefit from being contextualized by ancient Greco-Roman politics? And where do you see the intersection of the personal self with the political self in the speakers of these poems?
KP: Well, I think all the poems are concerned with our current culture and political climate, more or less, but I see what you mean. The later poems address those subjects more directly.
Since that event in the Roman baths, I’ve been interested in a kind of historical layering or collage as a way to understand both the pastness of the past and the presence of the (often disheartening and, yes, alienating political) present. I don’t do this because I think there is any kind of one-to-one correspondence between, say, the showman Nero and the showman Donald Trump. Or between the life of Nero and the present fact of a dying cat. They’re not equivalent and they’re not really even productively comparable. But I think they can work almost metaphorically, if one story can bump into another, sending up sparks.
Maybe I’m talking about a kind of complex metaphorical thinking, elements of one story throwing light (and clarifying) elements of another, the past layered atop the present as vehicle might be layered atop tenor (or vice versa). It’s a complicated way of thinking about narratives and I’m not sure I know yet how to talk about it. But when I’m writing these narratives that pass side-by-side through very different moments in history, I feel like I’m learning (most of all) about a present moment, lit by the reflected light of the past.
As to the intersection of the personal self and the political self: I think in this book they’re really the same thing, though plural. Political selves, personal selves. There are so many speakers in this book and I imagine them moving through all kinds of time politically, though they don’t always know it. Sometimes, in their minds, they are only going about their days.
This isn’t to say that I don’t have strong political beliefs. I loathe the echoes of fascism I hear in our current political dialogue, especially from the right. I feel very strongly about that. But it’s a feeling that is maybe too pure and simple for me to get into a poem. In my poems, the political self exists more fruitfully not in its anger and despair, though those are helpful. I’m more interested in the political self that is trying to understand how we got here, who is caught in the thick of unsolvable political problems, who turns to stories and history to try to find sense. The task is to understand the problems.
KK: Many of the poems in The Fears are extended lyric narratives that employ section breaks to organize the poem’s progression. In fact, you have a singular voice when it comes to how you are able to employ section breaks in your poems. While many poets who also use section breaks use them as a method of division, something that creates a clear separation between themes or formal choices, your section breaks often feel much more fluid in the ways that they can separate content while also highlighting recurring images or concepts. Most importantly, the breaks never seem frivolous or unnecessary. I’m hoping you can speak a bit about how you view the purpose of section breaks in a poem. Do you approach them as a method of pacing? A way to help build tension between images? Or as something else entirely?
KP: I began using the little plus-signs as section breaks many years ago, partly as a way of helping myself to compose a poem. To my mind, alone in my study writing, the plus-sign meant “and then what?”—propelling me forward in the poem. Later, I began to think of those little plus-signs this way: each section of a poem is in addition to the previous section, propelling a reader forward to the eventual (invisible) equal sign at the end of the poem.
But I think that might just be a little bit uninteresting because it’s a personal quirk that I’ve embedded in my work for many years, a way of thinking about velocity and narrative. More importantly, over the years, I’ve come to reconsider white space (or noiseless space, where the plus-signs are) in new ways. I used to imagine that noiseless space served as a way of emphasizing a word (at the end of a line, stanza, or section, in increasing volume) or manipulating the speed at which a reader reads a poem (longer lines equal greater momentum).
Now I like to think about white space as reflective of the mind that I imagine is at work inside my poems, the mind that is thinking. Where and how long the mind hesitates, reconsiders, or reaches for the right word it hasn’t yet found tells me an awful lot about what kind of mind I’m dealing with in my poem. Is it a hesitant mind? Is it a mind that wants to get through one part of the story in order to dwell on another? Is it a mind that feels a big change happening in how it feels about what it’s saying? Or a mind that needs to hesitate in unarticulated thought before that thought finds (sometimes surprising) articulation? All those are reasons for section breaks—and other kinds of noiseless space, as well.
And at the same time, I’m concerned with making poems that are musically interesting—a task that is probably at odds with recreating the illusion of a real mind at work on an unsolvable problem.
KK: There are several poems in this collection that seem to be deeply personal. Yet, you’ve said in previous conversations that although you enjoy the “performance” of confessional voices, you are not capable of writing directly about yourself. Instead, you’ve said that you work from imagined spaces and characters. I can definitely see some of these sets and actors at work within The Fears. For example, in your poem “Absences,” you write, “This is the context for my poem, / an elaborate set within which my actors / speak their lines.” It also seems to be continually snowing across the spaces that these poems inhabit, and there are also moments of first-person narration, especially when the narrator is reflecting on epistemological or existential questions, that use of first-person reads as one step removed from the explicitly personal “I.” However, there are also many moments throughout the poems in this book that use first-person narration in ways that do not feel imagined or separate from a more confessional mode of writing. It is difficult for me as a reader to understand the “I” in a poem like “A Dog Barking Into The Night,” who shares an intimate and specific moment with his brother outside of the hospital where their father is dying, as simply a character within a small play. And I’d argue that this is just one example of the personal intimacy that occurs regularly across the collection.
So, has writing this collection changed your perspective on how capable you are of “confessional” poetry? If it has, can you speak to this change? Or do you still believe yourself incapable of the confessional mode? And, if so, why?
KP: No, I’m writing in voices that probably seem personal or even confessional, but it’s a performance. I’m still uninterested in telling the truth about myself or my experiences. I know that for other poets it’s vital to speak to the truth of what has happened to them. I get the power of that. But it’s not for me.
To write only about true things that have happened to me feels constricted. The world of the not-me, the worlds I haven’t experienced—they’re so much bigger and more interesting than anything I’ve experienced first-hand. And I find it much more exciting to live in those worlds than to live in this one. And I feel the same about other characters. I am sometimes sick of myself and my immediate concerns and the way my brain works. I find it exciting to live in the minds of other people, to, as you suggest, perform confessional voices. There’s freedom in that. It allows for both empathy and bad behavior.
But the fears that I’m writing about in this book—those are real and they are mine. I think most good poems spring from some kind of anxiety—about love, God, loss, death—and in my case, the anxieties are where the poems become deeply personal, as you say. Annihilation. Absence. Death. History.
The other night, I was presenting this book to a group of readers and they were interested in what was true and what was not true in the poems. At first, I thought we were talking about larger truths, grand truths—but then I realized they wanted to talk about what was factual. Had my father killed a man? Did I steal the finger of a mummy? (No, and no.)
It occurred to me to talk then about a few particular “true” memories—a friend who, after he died, left letters hidden for his wife to find; a kitten discovered dead in a car’s engine—that sparked the poems. But those memories are just sparks. The gas that makes the flame is anxiety. And feeling utterly free about where the poem might move, into history or fiction, allows the fire to spread.
Maybe that metaphor is a bit overwrought—but I think you get the picture.
KK: I’d like to return to the idea of form for a moment. I’m very interested in how you approach the line throughout The Fears. Many of the poems do not follow “standard,” left justified lineation. Instead, they are written in a series of stepped lines, but these stepped lines also eschew the traditional triadic stagger of Williams through enjambement and varied stanza breaks. However, there does seem to be consistency in your approach. As with Williams, are these formal choices your “solution to the problem of modern verse?” Or are there entirely different methods behind your approach to lineation within your poems?
KP: I’ve never set out to find a solution to modern verse. That seems to me to be a scary quest for a few reasons I won’t go into.
For years, I had a fairly consistent, and conservative, sense of what might give a line of poetry integrity. For instance, a line of poetry might have a first half and a second half, divided by an (often unpunctuated) caesura. The second half musically echoes the first half … and therein lies musical interest. Or a long line of poetry might create a kind of left-to-right velocity that a short line, with its slower, more vertical movement, cannot accomplish. Or a line might be driven metrically, dactyls creating a feeling of lightness that trochees abhor, etc.
And I still hold all that to be true. But somewhere, about twenty years ago, I started to pay attention to the particular rhythms that can be created by various lengths and degrees of silence in a poem. I first noticed it in the syncopation of formal poetry, where the caesura creates a short silence that alternates with the long silence of the line-break—establishing a kind of rhythm that good poets establish and then, having established it, they vary it. That is, it’s not just stressed and unstressed syllables that create beat; rhythms of silence can create a sort of counterpoint in a poem.
Once I noticed that, I began experimenting more and more with rhythms of silence in my free verse poems—using them both to create a kind of music of their own but also, as I mentioned above, to create the illusion of a mind at work on an unsolvable problem, a mind that hesitates, turns around, rethinks, hustles forward, hits a wall.
The trick, I suppose, is to be both musically interesting with your silences and also create that sense of the mind thinking. These ought to be mutually exclusive, since most minds thinking aren’t musically interesting and most music doesn’t resemble the silence of a thinking mind. But, there you go. Like juggling apples and chainsaws.
KK: In closing, I want to ask about the idea of fear within the collection. Depending on which section of the book readers are in, the focus seems to vacillate between more public or external and more personal or internal representations of fear. Though it is evident from the title that fear is central to these poems, it’s less obvious how readers should interpret the purpose and power of the fears that these poems reveal. How do you see fear creating the framework of this collection? Is it a bad thing, a motivating force, or something less binary and more complex?
KP: Well, I think it’s complex. Again, the themes in my books only emerge as I begin to put them together, often years after I’ve written the original poems. So the theme of “fear” is something I discovered only after I’d written every page of The Fears.
I suppose that I don’t understand how one can face one’s own eventual complete annihilation without terror. That terror might be debilitating, but it might also be generative. It might have something to do with why I write these poems—in the way that creating the illusion of a mind—a consciousness—at work on an unsolvable problem also preserves, as in amber, something of the mind of the person doing the writing. If there’s any of my self in this book, that’s where it is. In that need to preserve the intricacies of a mind, my mind.
Before I wrote poetry, I wrote endless journals, volumes and volumes of them. I suspect the same impulse might be behind those, though the results make for dull reading.
But I think that there’s more at work about fear than the merely ars poetical or generative. Rather, I was also interested in exploring qualities of non-existence in this book—in the poems’ speakers and in the other invented characters who populate the poems. What does their eventual absence mean? How do you talk about non-existence? Is ancient history a kind of non-existence of the present and those who populate it? And how does the ancient past exist inside the present, if at all?
And, also: where are we going with all this? Politically? Personally? My editor wanted me to add one big poem to the back of the book and, at the time, I just happened to be working on the poem called “Automotive.” It’s the last poem in the book now.
In it, a kitten has crawled into the engine block of a car, where it’s nice and warm. The speaker in the poem thinks a lot about his troubled nation, its history of racism and slavery and cruelty. And he thinks about the kitten, which means many things to him: sentimentality, guiltlessness, sweetness, love.
And throughout, he worries about his own complicity, the complicity of his ancestors, in a world that has been filled with cruelty, with troubling history.
And then his mother walks out to the car, jingling her car keys.
The kitten’s eventual certain destruction (the moment she will turn the key) felt like a good metaphor for some of the fears I was working with in the book.
KK: Kevin, The Fears is truly an indelible book, and I really appreciate you having this conversation with me.
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