A Conversation with Adrian Blevins
BY KEVIN PRUFER
Adrian Blevins’s most recent book of poetry is Status Pending, out this past fall from Four Way Books. She also co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers, and is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.
***
Kevin Prufer: Status Pending is your fourth collection of poems. All of them have been distinguished by a kind of wild delight in language and persona, but this is your wildest yet. Can you tell me how those first books led you to this one, what your path and development as a poet has looked like?
Adrian Blevins: I wrote the most god-awful poems as an undergraduate student, where I studied with the magnificent Rodney Jones at my little artsy college in the Blue Ridge mountains (that is now gone, sigh). That those first poems were so bad isn’t Rodney’s fault—he did what he could do. And I was just a kid. But because they really were cliched, ill-considered, sentimental, and worse, eventually I started writing fiction, even publishing a little story at the age of eighteen in a magazine called Virginia Country for which I was paid $100, if I remember correctly. Nothing happens in this story. A Holden-Caulfield-type narrator talks about the night she discovers her grandmother dead. All she really does is relate how weird she feels about it and how weird she is just in general as a person, depicting meanwhile the queer south that she has been raised in and must figure out how to understand before she dies. All we can really say about this narrator is that she has got a mouth on her.
Anyway, I have a kid before I graduate from college—my first son, Weston. I am occupied by feeling how hard it is to be a mom-waitress while trying to write for about two years when I decide that what would be better for all concerned would be for me to do it all while in graduate school, instead. This is how I end up at what is now called Hollins University, which is the only graduate program I applied to. But apparently being a new mom writing fiction in graduate school still wasn’t difficult enough for me, so I decide to have another baby just to raise the stakes a little bit more. I had my second son, Benjamin, while at Hollins. One consequence of this string of decisions is that now my fiction is just as bad as my poetry had been. So, at Hollins, I learn to fail. I learn how very hard it is to write well. But I also learn that I love learning—and writing—more than I love almost anything in the world, so I take up poetry again and study with Eric Trethewey—the incomparable Natasha Trethewey’s father—and my poems become the thing that begins to artistically sustain me, thanks honestly mostly to him. He really was a wonderful teacher because he seemed to have faith in what I could do even though I was full of the most terrible doubts about myself. Rick taught me how to write poetry by teaching me how to read it. Our great teachers do that.
KP: And after Hollins…?
AB: I start teaching in a variety of community colleges and eventually at Hollins itself where I get stuck for about ten years trying to raise my two boys by teaching composition and creative writing courses and experiential courses I get to invent in which my students and I take trips to waterfalls and convents where nuns tell us that they have been “besieged by robbers.” We also go to training camps where firemen train to be firemen and to Roanoke College’s anatomy lab, where we get to see an already-autopsied body after going to the hospital to see newborn babies. We did all of this for what I call “a color study,” by which I mean a life-force study. I kid you not. Everything I am saying here is one hundred and ten percent true. It’s the queer south we’re talking about here. But art is hard on marriages, as children are hard on marriages, so eventually I get divorced, re-married, pregnant for a third time, and end up at Warren Wilson’s MFA program, where, after my third child, my daughter August, is born, I write The Brass Girl Brouhaha.
There’s a whole essay about that at Waxwing.
This book wins a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and The Kate Tufts Award. My father was a painter and an art history professor, and one of the poems in that book begins “This is the main story about how I hate my father.” When I showed my dad the manuscript—it was in galley form—he flipped right to that page, of course. I said, “Daddy, don’t begin with that one!” He said, “Adrian, don’t apologize.” And he meant every word of that. He was a permission giver. He was my first great teacher. He believed in the power of art to transform us. In Brouhaha, I am trying to figure out how to make something like “the truth” out of growing up the way I did somehow poetic. It ends up being comic; in this book, I am mostly telling stories. I don’t quite know how to write a book of poetry yet, however. I mean, I try, but that book wouldn’t have existed without the help of my other great teachers—Tony Hoagland and Steve Orlen at Warren Wilson. And Chase Twichell at Ausable Press did a marvelous job with it. These three heard something in this manuscript. I’ll bet that what they heard was that girl with the mouth on her.
For the next two books, I am trying to figure out how to move away from that early, mostly narrative mode. It is so very difficult for us to work beyond ourselves, but we should try. In Jamboree, I am specifically working in and with sentences—trying to figure out what kind of line can hold or contain as much sentence as possible without the whole thing collapsing. Appalachians Run Amok is a plea for understanding for rural people. It’s about me—I mean, it has that central lyric impulse—but I do try to make it bigger than me. It’s a defense of where I’m from. (“Gothic Pastoral” and “Wrecked Eden” Diane Seuss and I called it in a panel we got together at the AWP in 2019.) I remember when I was very young wanting to be a writer—remember, I started out writing fiction—reading Philip Roth and Grace Paley and other famous writers from gritty cities in the Northeast; part of the turmoil I felt as a very young writer came from feeling always so country in comparison to these superstars I loved who knew what a kiosk was and how to get around via subway train. I grew up in a small town in Virginia, but I am country. By the time we get to Appalachians, I am like, well, fuck you too if you don’t like how country a mouthy woman from the country can be!
KP: So, I’m thinking about what you say about pushing the line, about how lines work as opposed to sentences. When I was interviewing for a tenure-track job many years ago, someone on the hiring committee asked me this: “Do you have a theory of the line?” Obviously, the answer was supposed to be, “Of course!” But what was I to say after that? Hell if I knew. But let me ask you something like the same question: how are you thinking about lines of poetry these days, and about what they do to sentences?
AB: Oh, Kevin, I love this question. As you know now, I came to poetry via prose—my first attempts at poetry were little rants against the world and my parents and that wrecked Eden or whatever; my writing was naive. But I was a reader. I mean, I really read a lot—William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor—all the great Southern writers. Philip Roth, too, as I said. Virginia Woolf. Saul Bellow. All these masterful stylists. But I didn’t have the life experience to write the way these writers did. To quote the great Julia Garner as Ruth Langmore in Ozark: “I [didn’t] know shit about fuck.” I needed to work in a smaller frame. And like almost all of us, I did not know what to do with lines at first. Not. At. All.
Then gradually I came upon certain realizations, or theories, if you will, that I know may be eccentric and also the oldest news in the world. But I think really great poems are boxes for and of contradiction. I think they have to find a way to weave expectation on the one hand and surprise on the other, and that the more they can do this in layers or competing component parts, the better the poem is. I am talking at the level of diction—mixing the high and the low like all the great Southern writers do. I am talking dialectical relationships between words and word-parts: not the yellow daisy, but the piss daisy; not an erudite sophisticate, but an erudite fuck-up. I am talking at a sonic level: gutturals next to sibilants; goat heads singing soft songs. And I am talking at the level of syntax. I am always talking at the level of syntax. Our ears, hearing a sentence, long for predication. We can’t wait for the subject of whatever sentence to go on and jump off that cliff over there and have a heart attack and die. The line uses the sentence for its own purposes—if the sentence is a river, the line is rocks and boulders and big-floating UFO animal shapes in the river, always slowing things—predication, which is understanding—down. And creating this wonderful sense of tension thereby. I hope this makes sense. I could go on and on about it. Expectation on the one hand. Surprise on the other.
KP: That’s a great answer. I love the image of the river and rocks. It’s perfect. Now, I’m curious about what you say about your poems being about yourself, but hopefully bigger than yourself. Can you elaborate on that? Bigger how? Where do you see yourself in your poems?
AB: Also a great question! I am not good at math and I am too lazy for research, so I don’t know the statistics, but we do not have a long history of the experience of women in our literature. Divide that number by a third, and you’ll get a history of the experience of mothers in our literature. Divide that number by a third again, and you’ll get a history of the experience of rural, working-class mothers in our literature. Divide that number yet again by the same amount, and you’ll get a history of the experience of queer, Black, and other POC, and rural working-class mothers in our literature. And here we are below zero.
Now, I am old-fashioned. I think that great literature really can and should transcend the identity of the person who wrote it. But we all have differing selves and personalities and experiences in life—what even gets to be thought of as literature changes when who’s in the driving seat changes. Believe it or not, I was a shy child. I didn’t even speak very much for the first five years of my life. I am still more introverted than people think. But I have studied writing and literature all my life, and it has taught me so much about speaking the truth, as I say, despite the consequences. If my lyric I—a fabrication for sure; a thing made of vowel and consonant sounds—can be brave and say what it needs to say about the experience of more working-class mothers from the rural south despite whatever consequence—people think I’m a little crazy; people ignore me; I don’t get reviewed in The New York Times Book Review—I feel I’ve done work in some way beyond myself in the sense that I have used myself to make a little dent in that negative number up there. I hope this doesn’t sound strange to you.
KP: It doesn’t sound strange at all. It makes a lot of sense. I remember when we were first in contact about this interview. I hadn’t read Status Pending yet, but I’d read your other collections, Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and Brass Girl Brouhaha. I recall your saying that I should read the new one before committing to the interview because it was a departure for you, “full of experiments.” How would you describe these “experiments”?
AB: I really am a truth-teller. It has gotten me in trouble my whole life. I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to teach what I love for thirty years now—mostly I try to teach my students how to be mouthy truth-tellers too—but academic environments are not without their icky caves of deceit, as I am sure you know. I noticed this and started to wonder what was at stake that made everyone so willing to deceive everyone else, which to me is the exact opposite of what we should be doing if we really want to be good artists, thinkers, citizens, neighbors, teachers, lovers, parents, friends, and husbands and wives and students and so on. What would make being so inauthentic worthwhile? Could it really be money?
I decided it was status.
Now, I’m not saying I’m immune. Nobody’s immune. I’m just as messed up as any other fucked-up little capitalist, and I grew up without a lot of resources, so that’s a driving force, too. In Status Pending I am exploring our tendency to measure ourselves against others in all the ways we do. I was also tired of writing about myself—so so so tired of writing about myself!—and so I started playing around with alternatives. The first sequence was the abecedarian sequence. It was the closest to fiction I have gotten in thirty years. I had so much fun writing those poems. But I am funny even when I am trying to be serious—the more serious I try to be, the funnier I seem to become. In The Habit of Being, Flannery O’Connor says somewhere, “In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.” I can really relate to that.
I was having fun mocking my colleagues and human nature generally in my status poems when life intervened, as life has a habit of doing, and my husband of twenty-two years moved out of our house in Maine. He left while I was in Oregon at the AWP in 2019 with Diane Seuss trying to describe the gothic poetry of a wrecked Eden. Talk about deceit. Talk about cowardice. So of course I had to go back to writing divorce poems again, and the status sequence suddenly became personal, though it really was not all that difficult to make this transition, as we do talk about our relationships in terms of status, and the legal system is in love with the word, as far as I can tell. I now say that divorce really is my subject matter. In Brouhaha, I take on my parents’ and my first divorce. In Jamboree and somewhat in Appalachians, also my first divorce. And here in Status Pending I’m at it again. What if I am accidentally-on-purpose causing these divorces so I will have something to write about? Haha! Obviously, I’m being silly. But sometimes I do wonder. My second ex-husband is currently in training to go work for the US Department of State, where once he is more proficient in writing and speaking French, he’ll be sent to a part of Africa that has recently undergone a military coup. I mean, to try to fix that. Everything I am saying here is one hundred and ten percent true. In Status Pending, I actually sent that man to Africa in one poem. Is his forthcoming trip coincidence or magic spell?
I do urge students to be mindful not to assume that the speaker of a poem is the same person as the poet. And language constructs selves—we all know that the person who goes to the mailbox cannot be the same “person” who speaks in a poem, language being the slippery thing that it is. And there are many persona poems in Status Pending—in the second sequence of prose poems, for example, I am inventing “characters” like “Glam Status,” “Cult Status,” “Overall Status” and so on to speak toward those forms of popularity (let’s call it). I am trying to create an interior world there that is totally beyond my own personal experience. But in some of the other poems, the “I” is me. The I is Me the I is Me the I is Me might have to be the title of my next book. So my experiment to get away from the lyric I in Status Pending apparently failed. And I don’t care. What I want from poetry is intimacy. What I love about the speakers of poems that I love is their emotional generosity. Hélène Cixous says in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing that “the truth is what writing wants.” I know that there is not just one truth. I really do know that. But I still think that we must try to get to something like it, knowing that whatever it is will always evolve (because we are always changing). Otherwise, why write?
KP: Maybe poems aren’t really much good at getting at the truth. Maybe that’s what interrogations are for, or contracts. I used to think that good poems sort of circled many truths. Now I think that good poems help us understand questions better than helping us find answers. Does having something like this in mind open doors into your poems? What do you think of all this?
AB: I agree one hundred and ten percent! The great Mary Ruefle says, “I would rather wonder than know.” There’s a kind of STEM Nazism going on out there trying to make the case that the only things worth “knowing” can be counted and quantified. This used to drive me crazy when I used to listen to NPR and people talked about the GDP. What I mean is, any poet knows that you can’t stack a whole bunch of money up, measure it, and get any realistically complete sense of how humans are faring. What about the happiness quotient? The beauty quotient? What I mean when I talk about “truth” is a truth about feeling. Feeling is always changing. And it is always all mixed up. I am glad that we’re still teaching and reading lyric poetry here in the terribly absurd and deeply worrisome—dark, dark, dark—decades of the twenty-first century because of how the lyric is able “to circle many truths,” as you say. W.H. Auden says that “poetry just may be the clear expression of mixed feelings.” Now, I know people are going to get their panties all bunched up about that word “clear” there. You can take it out if you want to. The point here about the “truth” of feeling is that it is double, triple—a mirror behind a mirror behind a mirror in front of a wave of water made of air. People do want clear answers about things. But that’s just impossible. It’s naive. We must remember Keats’s idea of “negative capability” here, and Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” We need poetry to continue to remind us of these important contradictions. I think we’re desperate for lyric truth in America right now. Truly I do.
KP: I do, too. But I’m curious about this: where do you see yourself in American poetry, in English language poetry? What movements have inspired you, what ideologies, what lineages?
AB: I am more of a Modernist than a Postmodernist, though I didn’t figure this out until very recently. One of the many good things that came about as a consequence of my second divorce was the gift of my involvement with my late-life love, Cedric Gael Bryant, who has taught with me at Colby for twenty years now. It’s a long story, but our friendship became more than a friendship after Cedric’s wife died and my ex-husband left—partly because of our long conversations across those decades about writing and books. Cedric, who is a professor of American literature, has the most beautiful library for a mind, specializing in Southern literature and African American literature. He’s also a great Cormac McCarthy fan. Well, I’m like a kid in a toy store asking him all kinds of questions night after night while we make soup together in the kitchen. Recently I insisted that he explain the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism one more time to me, as where one worldview (let’s call it) leaves off and another begins has always confused me. Cedric begins by talking about Sisyphus having to have a little hope, which I sort of get and sort of don’t, so he stops doing whatever he’s doing at the cutting board and goes looking for his copy of the last few pages of McCarthy’s The Road, which, for anyone who does not know—if that’s possible—is a most astounding postapocalyptic novel. Here’s what he reads:
Do you remember that little boy, Papa?
Yes I remember him.
Do you think that he’s all right that little boy?
Oh yes. I think he’s all right.
Do you think he was lost?
No. I don’t think he was lost.
I’m scared that he was lost.
I think he’s all right.
But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?
Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.
The point here is that the difference between these two isms is hope. Even Sisyphus has to have a little hope to keep pushing his dumb rock up that mountain. Otherwise, he’d stop and throw himself over. The Modernists believed in the power of language. They did not think that all was anarchy and chaos. (And I believe that even those who did believe that it was all anarchy and chaos chose to think otherwise in order to get out of bed in the morning.) But the Modernists knew that we had words. And one another! Well, with three children and a new granddaughter living in this world—and with Cedric with me in the kitchen and elsewhere—I need hope. And “goodness” here in the McCarthy is a synonym for hope. I said earlier that I have been telling people recently that divorce seems to be my main subject. But what if it has always been love?
KP: Yes, that’s how I’ve often framed the distinction, too—and why when asked the question, I always say I find the Modernist sensibility more attractive (for all the ugly practitioners of Modernism of the past). Prufrock really does hope for something, he’s just not quite sure what it is, right? But what does that hope look like in Status Pending? How would you describe it? Hope for what?
AB: Kevin, thank you so much for asking such wonderfully provocative questions. And for doing this interview in the first place. And for your wonderful poems and contributions to American poetry throughout the years. And your new novel! I can’t wait to read it. Anyway, I’m so glad you don’t think I’m weird about that Modernism thing. It is such a relief to find our kindred spirits. My first thought about this goes all the way back to Aristotle’s idea of catharsis. We’re born alone and we die alone and live much of our lives alone even if we do have one thousand children to try to stave off loneliness (which I do, especially if you count my students). Good poems contradict the STEM fact of our actual existential aloneness with what we might call the miracle of articulation. The feeling you should get after reading a good poem is, well, thank God somebody finally found a way to say that. Auden said that our response to reading even the saddest poem should be “joy, even hilarity.”
About Status Pending itself, it’s hard to say because the book is, in a way, so jokey. A lot of Appalachian literature entails stories of escape (or the consequences of not being able to escape), and the book is, on top of whatever else it is, the story of a journey out of the muck of the place I was born in (as much as I love it, and I do love it too). It looks back nostalgically and kind of apologetically at the idea of home, and yet defends itself also. Maybe? The persona poems that are mocking our search for status (which is a search for a way to feel at home around others in a world that’s changing the rules very rapidly) are layered over a journey architecture, and although no real “solutions” are found, aside from the hope of contradictory feelings having been articulated, there’s hope in the main speaker’s increased understanding, or growth as a person, as she does seem to understand at last that we actually cannot ever run away from the Appalachians inside ourselves (despite how far into Africa we may go). Does this make sense? If you had asked me this question five days from now, I’d probably have come up with a different answer. Another way of thinking about it, though—of saying what Aristotle says about catharsis with women this time in mind—is to return to my first book, which I introduce with various quotes from various writers. The first section, “Life History,” begins with this quote from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:
For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and they are infinite in number, and all the same.
Somehow, when I was just a tot at the age of forty when I published my first book, I knew that the subject would always be “broken” families. It’s the subject of all us moderns. It’s the subject of the luckiest, most affluent, most urban mothers. To think about what a family is and is not but maybe could be through a status lens is just to shift the camera a little to the left—to think more sociologically and even biologically about it. But the problem is still the same. And the answer is still the same. My granddaughter’s name is Brystol Mae. She was named after the city of Bristol, Virginia / Tennessee where her father was born forty years ago. She was born with a congenital heart defect, which they’re working on at Boston’s Children’s Hospital so far with much success. I don’t say this to make you sad. I say it to make the point. You would not believe how beautiful Brystol Mae is—she has her father’s eyes, which means she has my eyes, which means she has my father’s eyes. You would not believe how well she “sings,” as her Dad calls it, when she babbles about the day. Brystol will be eight months old at the end of December. Let’s call her Hope.
