Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collections Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012) and Paperweight (University of Akron Press, 2026), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, and The Yale Review, and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Glenside, Pennsylvania, with his wife and daughter.
***
Cate Lycurgus: The more time I spend with this book, the more convinced I am that at heart, it’s a longing for transformation. In the titular piece “Paperweight,” the speaker describes his semi-regular metamorphosis into a rock, illustrating the collection’s obsession with shedding various weights: of history, family, myth, failed ambition. It’s interesting also that this book predominantly uses prose poems—can you tell us some about the way you see prose poems operating? What unique transformations do they make possible?
Ryan Teitman: When you write a prose poem, you make a calculated trade. You forego one of the most powerful tools in a poet’s toolbox, the line break, but you gain something new and strange: the ability to add density. A smallish prose poem might become like a smooth stone you’d skip across the face of a lake. A larger one could have the heft of a brick. That feel, that weightiness, has a distinct effect on a poem. And, as you once pointed out in a conversation we had, the density can go the other direction, too. You had a perfect description of it: a prose poem that relies heavily on paragraph breaks might have the airiness of a soufflé.
For many prose poems, an uptick in that density means an increase in the pressure on the language. And that pressure is the perfect environment for transformation, akin to how gems are formed deep in the earth. The prose poem can create an environment ripe for change. Fables work in the same way. They’re often centered around transformations, and the compactness of the story is conducive to the fantastical. A person can turn into an animal or a rock or a tree, or vice versa. I think early in my career I worked to cram as much wildness as I could into a poem. Now, I tend to be more interested in how one moment of change, large or small, can ripple through the world of a poem.
CL: I had forgotten that I called them soufflés! But I think this is true, because a prose poem is comparatively effortless to inhale; yet by plowing through, it’s easy to miss those surprising, startling moments that you mention, like your congress of fish with “milk bottle bodies” that huddle before a boy “like a children’s choir,” or a grandfather who sips whiskey through a straw and reads the dark “with a scholar’s fluency,” or the mother who builds a sod house and insists on living in it. Yet even through surprise, these poems feel elemental—with the boy, his father, knives, birds, bones, the old country, dreams—and take on a fable-like quality.
And one that quickly becomes absurd: a series of plagues that run through an office building, a cloud and ghost on a date in a bar, the speaker’s own foot bone found loose on the floor. What lies at the intersection of the transformative and the absurd? Without line breaks to enact tension, suspense, and surprise, what different considerations do you make to prevent pieces from becoming too dense—or to return to the original figure—from the soufflé deflating into an ordinary paragraph?
RT: I think that every prose poem, like a sonnet, needs some sort of turn. Some change of course or thought that transforms it from a block of prose into a poem and also keeps it from coagulating into a dull mass or, conversely, collapsing like an underbaked soufflé.
I’ve been reading Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things lately, which is exclusively prose poems, and it is striking to me how formally similar it is to Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets. They’re completely different subject matter, voice, tone, cadence, imagery, but the scaffolding is essentially the same: a series of one specific kind of poem (prose poem/sonnet) that relies on a turn and also provides a vehicle for a memoiristic narrative. They’re also both exceptional collections. And when you place them in conversation, you see how the same features that make a sonnet work can be mapped onto the prose poem, and vice versa. I’ve wondered for years what a poetry collection that was half sonnets and half prose poems would look like and what else it would reveal about the two forms and their kinship. (Though, to be fair, I haven’t been curious enough to go and write that collection myself.)
As for the intersection between transformation and the absurd—I think the power in each of them lies not in their novelty, but in how the speaker or figure in the poem reacts to them. I’ve written a lot of poems that were unsuccessful because they just presented something strange and didn’t make any effort to grapple with it. “Here’s a weird thing I saw” is usually a pretty boring poem, no matter how weird the thing you saw was. Transformations and the absurd both jolt us out of our daily lives, and in doing so, give us a new lens to look at them with. We just have to take that opportunity.
CL: In your own pieces, the turn frequently comes at the very end. Those last lines feel like a stuck window cranking open: “The books will belong to the boy now”; “He laughs as he forgets the sound of his name”; “…hands perched atop his lap, waiting like a question without an answer”; “…walking across the sea, toward life on a farther shore.” They also often shift from a metaphorical or figurative place to a literal one, or vice-versa. How do you think about where poems end or where they open onto? What occurs when you blend the literal with the figurative?
RT: I really like your description of the stuck window opening. It feels to me like there are two ways poems can end when you get down to it—by opening, where the window is finally unstuck and we get to look out onto a landscape that extends past the poem’s last lines, or by closing. Some poems click shut at the end like a well-made box. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that, which, funnily enough, I’ve been reminded of by my daughter’s toys. How a puzzle piece fits exactly into its spot in one way and no others. And I’ve noticed that recursive forms often are conducive to that kind of ending—the structure of a villanelle or pantoum can encourage that kind of snap-shut closure to a poem.
But it also has to be way too reductive to say “there are two ways to end a poem,” right? Can’t a poem end by collapsing on itself like an ancient star or scattering on the wind like dandelion seeds or a thousand other things? When I first started writing poetry, I was desperate to understand how it worked. I remember being completely deflated on my first day of workshop in graduate school because my professor admitted that he was skeptical of workshop as a tool. (And he was, for the record, right.) I felt like I knew so little that to begin questioning the few things I did know was unsettling very the ground I stood on. But over the years, as I’ve built a foundation of knowledge about poetry, I’ve also realized how much of that foundation needs to be constantly reconsidered.
CL: Yes, I remember Nomi Stone and Luke Hankins’ essay in APR*, “Aesthetics and Ethics in Poetic Closure,” that detailed myriad ways to end a poem and provided examples. Which intrigued me at least as much as the various classifications because, while supposedly representative of a ‘move,’ in many cases the poems were defined by their ends. As in, each example couldn’t swap its ending and remain the same piece. It was also striking how you could probably categorize all the styles as either openings or closings, how sometimes even the closing click (think Bishop’s “One Art”) opens onto a realization. That click of recognition and, paradoxically, its surprise, is pure magic. For me, sound must fit; I’m wrestling with a poem right now where the end is a shade off and the sonics won’t lock. It’s not something I can predict or rush, what the discovery will be. And like you mention, it seems like I have to learn how to write a poem over and over again, each time I try.
So many of the poems in Paperweight have speakers or subjects who are either baffled or discouraged by writing—like in “An Essay on Criticism,” the boy who can’t make heads or tails of books he’s asked to review and ends up with observations like “this book is heavier than my sister when she was born” or the speaker in “My Book” who is deathly afraid his wife will actually read his novel, or the artist in “The Studio Boat” who drops most of his paintings in the water; even those he keeps could just as easily remain in a trunk, unseen. Writers often write about struggling to write or have poems about the impotence of poems, but these feel like more existential anxieties, not only about art but the life making it. To return a little to the absurd, how do you use it, (or humor!) to explore hard or weighty subjects?
RT: One of the books that really influenced me was Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life. It was full of these off-the-wall, vivid prose poems. I just pulled it off the shelf to look at it again, and the very first poem of the collection begins: “The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset.” A meat sunset! I had no idea what that meant when I first read it, but I knew I was on board for the ride. In one poem, a waitress struggles to deliver food in a room with a thousand moons flying everywhere, desperately looking for something to orbit. In another, electrical outlets start appearing all over the speaker’s body. The poems could be dark, yet there was so much energy, so much imagination, and that was incredibly compelling to me. But the prose poems weren’t the only part of the book—there were two long, lineated sequences, “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future,” that used the words in the dictionary between “future” and “terror” to create a surreal, apocalyptic landscape that echoed how we felt in the post-9/11, “War on Terror,” Iraq War world. And that was the brilliance of the book—how it spoke to the absurdity we were seeing every day.
You mentioned existential anxieties about art and making it—I certainly have those! I’ve heard it said that every poem is an ars poetica; I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but I think it might be more true for me than many other poets. Poems have always felt very much like things to me. More akin to a painting or sculpture than a story or a song. And a poetry collection is kind of like a little museum, isn’t it? There’s curation as to how the poems are presented, but each poem (usually) also stands on its own. You read through the collection in the order the author intended, or you can wander, flipping around and encountering poems in your own way. What makes ekphrasis so interesting to me is the act of making an entirely new piece of art from a current one. Is it a description? A translation? A jumping off point for something completely new? The tension between the two works of art in that relationship feels incredibly potent.
CL: A meat sunset! Wow. It’s true though, that sometimes the absurd feels like the only way to make sense of our moving through the world. And I love that idea of a poetry collection as a museum. Sometimes there’s the temptation to think of it as a narrative, which serves one kind of reader, but not others. I’m also fascinated by the thing-ness of poems, as you see them. In Paperweight, the obsession with making works in tandem with responses to the made things of others, be it Giselle, a painting of Caravaggio or Monet’s, films of Kurosawa, even Saturday morning cartoons! This might be an obvious question, but how do these things work their way into your poems, and what relationship do your poems have with those of others?
RT: Sometimes I’m writing a poem that responds directly to a piece of art, like Monet’s The Studio Boat. With paintings in particular, I often use them as springboards to a new narrative—maybe not something exactly following the work, but a bit askew. The story of the death of Orpheus set in rural America, or casting the serene, solitary painter instead as the town crank. In that way, they can be incredibly generative. But you also have to find a way to escape the gravity of the original work, so that the poem stands on its own, even if the reader has never seen the work that inspired it. I can think of one example in particular of an ekphrastic poem I couldn’t make work. I had just seen The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The angel Gabriel is visiting Mary to tell her that she will give birth to the son of God. We’re all used to the traditional depiction of angels in art: white robes, wings, maybe a long, skinny trumpet. But in Tanner’s painting, the angel is completely alien: just a vibrating column of pure light. There’s no humanity to it; it’s more like a portal than a being. I was struck by the painting. And a story I had known all my life was made new to me: I could see the awe—and terror—of an encounter with something beyond language, beyond understanding. I knew I wanted to write about this painting. But in all my attempts, I never got past simply describing what Tanner had done. They were glosses of the work, not poems in their own right. Maybe one day I’ll try again.
And sometimes, I’m not responding to a piece of art, I’m just encountering it within the world of the poem. Kurosawa’s High and Low is just as much a part of my life as the Norway Spruce in the backyard or a Larry Levis poem or my wife’s leek and potato soup or my daughter’s Mr. Paint Pig book. It just feels natural to include them in my poetry.
CL: Thank you for sharing about a failed (or delayed) attempt at poem-ing. We tend to talk about what worked, but less about the more common instance of scrapped experiments, practice. Beyond the poem “My Book” which I mentioned earlier, we have “Red Route One,” where the speaker is trying to draft a poem but gets distracted: “My wife yells for me to look out the window because there’s a pair of cardinals at the feeder. I yell back that I’m working on a poem, but then I look anyway…” We know the speaker has written a poem (we’re reading it) but not exactly the intended one, about The Hunt for Red October. The distraction has become the poem, the mistake has become a success. I think also of the piece “In Lieu of Flowers,” where the speaker describes a job writing obituaries: “I wasn’t very good at it—the job or the living. I mistakenly wrote ‘interned’ rather than ‘interred’ in a month’s worth of obits. Nobody noticed. Interment is a kind of internment, to be fair…” In this instance, the mistake becomes part of the discovery, part of the illumination and delight. So I’m curious first about the ways failure, either explicitly or implicitly, shapes your work? I know you mentioned thinking of most poems as ars poeticas, but I’m also wondering if you might speak about the overlap between writing and living?
RT: I think it’s fair to say that this book was born out of failure. I had a manuscript before this one, and I sent it out for years. I kept revising it over and over, and it kept close to getting published, but not quite. Finalist at some contests, semi-finalist at others. But really, it didn’t work as a book. Most of the poems were just… fine. Looking back now, I can see that I was writing the poems I thought other people wanted rather than the poems I wanted to write. Once I realized that, I wasn’t worried about failure anymore, because I was already steeped in it. (And I had the rejection emails to prove it.) I was free to do what I wanted, to shake off what I thought I should do and just do what I wanted to do. So I started writing the prose poems that became most of Paperweight. I let myself follow the work, no matter how strange the path it led me down.
“Red Route One” is a good example. I almost never use epigraphs in poems, but I absolutely loved the line from The Hunt for Red October: “Give me a stopwatch and a map and I’ll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows.” It’s pretty much a perfect little poem by itself, and it always felt inspiring to me. But every time I tried to use it as an epigraph, it turned out to be way more interesting than whatever poem I wrote. (In that way it was similar to my ekphrastic poems about the Tanner painting.) Eventually, I realized that the real subject of the poem was failure: writing something that can’t live up to its inspiration. Once I figured that out, everything fell into place.
It was only after I had put together Paperweight as a book that I realized how much there was about what it means to create things. All these poems are me trying to figure that out. But, of course, the figuring is also the answer.
***
