A Conversation with Corey Van Landingham
BY EVAN GOLDSTEIN
Corey Van Landingham is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Reader, I, which was published by Sarabande Books last week. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
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Evan Goldstein: Corey, thank you so much for joining me to talk about your brand-new collection of poems, Reader, I. And happy publication month!
You’ve brought, by now, three collections into the world; you’ve been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Stegner Fellow, and a Levis Prize winner. You hold a doctorate in Creative Writing, you’re teaching at the University of Illinois MFA program, and you have many other honors and publications. I’m curious: when you wrote your first poem, did you know where it would take you?
Corey Van Landingham: Thank you so much, Evan! I’m grateful to get the chance to talk with you, and for the time you’ve spent with this new book.
Considering that I “wrote” my first poem when I couldn’t even write (I dictated it to my mother in the kitchen when I was four years old), and that I continued to write quite awful poems, if you could even call them that, throughout my adolescence—absolutely not!
I will say that before I had any real idea of what all went into composing and publishing a book, before I had ever even read a whole collection of poetry, I dreamed of someday writing a book. I never in my life expected that it would happen, not even when sending a manuscript out for the first time, but I am…perseverant. Not to sound too much like a basketball coach in the post-game press conference, but I think one has to be both very perseverant and very lucky to publish work and to forge a life that allows one to center poetry.
When people hear you’re a poet, they think you have this really wild imagination (I have nightmares of in-class exercises where you’re expected to instantly fashion some ingenious idea or phrase). But in many ways, I just couldn’t ultimately imagine doing anything else with my life.
EG: I love that your first poem was a dictation—I imagine the same is true of the first-ever poem. Do you remember what that childhood poem was about?
I’m also curious about that process of forging a life with poetry at the center. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the KRCW radio program Bookworm, but its wonderful long-time host Michael Silverblatt has a question he likes to ask about how a poetic life feels: “are you a poet all the time?”
CVL: Oh, I remember what it was about, and can even probably quote from it some, since it’s kind of a funny creation myth in my family.
It was about how despite things ending throughout the day (lights being shut off in a small town, fires going out), love will endure. The first part of it was trying to be really serious and mature—aping the poems my mother would read to me—with lofty phrases like “as you see, my love.” But then it ended with something about unicorns and kittens being tucked up with their mother. So treacly!
And that’s such a great question. I do think that, now, I am a poet all the time, just in that there isn’t a minute of my waking life where I’m not seeing a potential poem. Part of that probably comes from being married to another poet—we’re constantly saying to each other, that’s such a poem. When I mentioned the always-seeing-the-poem thing to a friend, they said it sounded exhausting. But it isn’t even conscious, and I think it’s a learned, and honed, way of interacting with the world, a way of paying attention, seeing contradictions and moments to illuminate, being attuned to the rhythm and idiosyncrasy of natural speech.
EG: That sounds like a wonderful first poem! I can see a bit of that in your work still—not the treacly bits, but the tension between the everyday ugliness and beauty of living, the work of finding what endures, or how to endure, through the poem. Reader, I seems to ask about what endures, in our literature, in our civil and romantic rituals, and of ourselves as we figure out how to love. It’s a work that sits at the intersection of public and private, deconstructing and reconstructing an imaginative space in which a speaker can investigate marriage, the home, the spectacle a woman is expected to make of herself in public and private life in America. Like Brontë’s speaker in Jane Eyre, our speaker holds these things to the light, all in a search for an articulable private consciousness, negotiating a way to sustain the self, to sustain love for another, within an institution that, historically, has annihilated a woman’s selfhood. When did you know that these poems, this voice, and this set of concerns, was a book?
CVL: What a generous reading of these poems—“like Brontë’s Jane Eyre”!
Initially, the “Reader, I” poems spun out from a joke between me and my husband when we first moved in together (we had been long distance for years) and were planning our wedding. It was a kind of way to accentuate the mundane, like “Reader, I drank a beer.” “Reader, I burned the toast.” The more we threaded the phrase throughout the days, though, the more the quotidian did start to seem its own ceremony, buzzing with potential meaning. The first poem I wrote was a spinoff of the joke, something I wrote with absolutely no project in mind. But, perhaps because it was coming on the heels of my second book, which was, for many reasons, quite arduous in both writing and publishing, writing that “Reader, I” poem was fun. I couldn’t remember ever having fun writing a poem! And that was kind of seductive, and felt at first like a bit of an indulgence.
My doctoral advisor, John Drury, was really encouraging with these poems, and helped me see how the mundane moments were interacting with a larger literary history, a larger trajectory. I began the poems during his class on the sonnet sequence, where we read George Meredith’s Modern Love, which was a completely thrilling model on how the episodic, the seemingly minor, could loom and build over a collection. I was also taking a theory class on queer temporality, where we read a lot of speculative fiction in addition to queer theory. Though my book, of course, occupies a different space, the ideas about possibilities and refusals of moving through heteronormative time, of being legible to a chronological narrative, resonated and ultimately spurred poems that interacted with something beyond the myopia of the domestic scene.
I really didn’t want to write another book of love poems! I said that after my first book, as well. I guess I knew it was a book when I couldn’t stop writing them.
EG: I’m fascinated by this formal contradiction—that the sonnet class inspired this core of prose poems that makes up the spine of Reader, I. Throughout the collection, you wind through a number of forms: tercets that seem to splinter as they revolve, short-line poems that cling to the margin, long-line couplets, long lyrical monostiches, among others.
Yet the form that most fully expresses the narrator’s voice is the prose poem—a move toward (apparent) formlessness that sustains itself with pressure on the sonic qualities of your sentences. There’s beautiful music in these prose sequences. “Reader, I was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf.” “Reader, I did take a walk that day. In the park, prefair, rides in their peeling…” “Reader, I am not so hollow-boned as to suggest a natural bent to flight. But.”
If a sonnet’s strict ratios tend toward argument, what is it that drew you to this prose poem form, or that this form drew from you? There are 23 “Reader, I” poems in the collection—how many did you write that didn’t make it into the book?
CVL: I probably wrote at least 30 full “Reader, I” poems, with many other started-then-ditched drafts. And I felt like I could have written them forever—ideas for them still pop up fairly often, which I now have to suppress.
One thing I love about the prose poem is how it demands more of my spatial attention. Of course, one has to think and move across the horizon of the line, but so much of my attention in a lineated poem is vertical. These prose blocks materialized as little stages, which characters move across and interact with while also projecting their voices and lives around those artificial rooms. I felt like I could sink into a space when I was writing those, felt like I’m more immersed in the thick of something. They had a center of gravity different from poems that are progressing in lines down the page.
Part of what was really enjoyable, and difficult, about these prose poems is that with some of them I really wanted to have it both ways. I wanted the poems to work inside the seemingly less artificial space of the prose block—like you mentioned, they facilitated the development of voice in a different way—but I was also greedy and, in moments, wanted to preserve some line breaks.
So “Reader, I [studied sonnets]” is fourteen “lines,” and the last two end on the same sounds and allude to Shakespeare’s last couplet in “Sonnet 65”:
His:
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
Mine:
returning, as we must, to the year, what would thrill him, might
remind that even a slim crescent dazzles the black ink of night?
The wonderful Managing Editor and Designer for Sarabande, Danika Isdahl, delighted me in designing the interior so that I could keep those breaks (something that often wasn’t possible when poems were published individually in journals). I didn’t think it would work out, but she is a wizard and made it happen!
A desire to have it both ways spins off from the sonnet sequence, too. I love how they can maintain the tight, gem-like, lyric nature in the individual sonnet while also allowing for a development of narrative, character, emotion, and ideas across the larger sequence. Bruce Snider’s “Devotions” sequence, Patricia Smith’s “Motown Crown,” and the sequences in David Wojahn Mystery Train all do this really well.
In a way, I think the sonnet’s often-rhetorical turn, and its sense of proportion, helped guide the movement in my prose poems. In many of them, a scene or problem is introduced before the speaker turns (often outward, to the addressee of the reader) to a more discursive, and pensive, mode.
EG: In “Reader, I [studied sonnets],” I became obsessed with that line “But dawn’s novel idiom arose brilliant from the harbor”—the way your vowel sounds turn inside out as the scene comes into view. In Sonnet 65, Shakespeare’s question, like your speaker’s throughout, is about whether love, or beauty, “summer’s honey breath” can endure. What I so enjoy about your prose poems is that they, like a sonnet, seem to suspend in the air until the last moment, when sometimes contradictions resolve, but sometimes they deepen.
Shakespeare’s faith is in the act of making. He believes that love endures only in literature. “This miracle”—us discussing his poems now—is the only way our feelings will live on; they have to leave us in order to live. Reader I, too, looks to place this deep inward feeling into history, as we accompany your speaker on this contradictory journey through the self to find the beloved.
I find this movement between self and other fascinating. This morning, as I was driving home to prepare for our interview, I saw a dollhouse out on the curb. A little box made of plastic, sliced down the middle to reveal a pink interior—simulated kitchen, simulated bedroom, simulated kids’ rooms—and it struck me that this toy, in simulating an interior, loses its private space entirely, and that for many young girls this is a formative space for the imagination.
It felt like I had glimpsed an image from the intellectual project that is Reader, I. An object, a stage, where a speaker constructs an interior within a contrived space meant for consumption, yet invites a reader to witness this process. This contradiction—between self and beloved, between the private space of the thought and the public act of the poem, between the speaker, persona, and that slippery enigmatic “I”—charges these poems with a danger, an excitement, of being asked to witness the intimate act of a consciousness negotiating space for itself in a world that wants to consume it.
Reader, I is troubled by the degree to which women are expected to perform, to sacrifice, to be on display. Yet it exists in a time in which our cultural criticism often collapses the distance between an author and their creations, be it the speaker of a poem or the character in a novel. In poems so concerned with the domestic (the private) and the public, how do you conceive of the relationship between the audience and the “I”?
CVL: Oh, I love that odd, fortuitous dollhouse! And what you say here, too, about how the simulation of an interior, in its incision into (and thus exposure and destruction of) a private space, is indeed where imagination may begin.
I do think that pedagogical aspect of this particular form of play—the dangers of collapsing the private space, but also the real knowledge gained in being able to imagine oneself transgressing it, flitting in and out of it, always potentially observed, but also able to imagine oneself into a world of one’s own creation—connects back to Jane Eyre, to Brontë’s bildungsroman, and her revolutionary unfurling of a self in first-person narrative. Of course, Reader, I isn’t quite a bildungsroman, but it does engage with how a self is defined, understood, and ultimately developed without the bounds of an institution.
As for the relationship between the “I” and the audience, at some point this “I” felt closer to the exterior world (to the reader, the addressee) than myself. Part of that is the performative nature of these poems (that sense of being spotlit across these minor dramas). Part of that, I think, is a genuine desire for the interior space to expand, for the self-conscious display of domesticity and gender and love to open up to something new. If a spectacle risks erasing subtlety through the sensational, the exaggerated, the pointed “look here” these poems sometimes demand,I hope there’s also an afterimage of sorts (like those spots left in the sky, and the eyes, after a firework display) that lingers beyond the theatrical moment beyond the joke, the rhyme, the speaker’s confession. Like a small, slow revelation of what surrounds, changes, and is changed by the seemingly larger, dramatic act. Like the everyday life within a marriage, and also just the formulation of a self.
One of the most difficult parts of writing these poems was creating a speaker who felt like a real, complex human—one that could devolve and develop over the course of the collection—but who also is clearly a character. These poems are not autobiographical. That work of imagination, that distance it allows, was crucial for my own entry into the book. While there are of course many resonances with my own life, these poems aren’t mirrors—one has to become a wiser version of themselves in a poem, to be able to be vulnerable without xeroxing their lives. A xerox isn’t art.
EG: I love that the distance between the author and the work is precisely what allowed you to create. In her last interview for The Paris Review, with Henri Cole, Louise Glück says “Exactly transcribed lived experience will not always make the best poem possible, partly because your conclusions about what you’ve already lived are made before you start writing. What you want to have happen is that on the page you discover something.”
What did you discover in the process of making these poems that you didn’t know before?
CVL: I completely agree with what Glück said about exactly transcribed experience not allowing the best poem to materialize, and with the sense that discovery is necessary in a good poem. But I’m not sure that “real” lived experience always obstructs such a discovery. I think it shuts down other possibilities in a poem, potentially, but simply by putting it into writing, into the artificial frame of the poem, ideally one is made to uncover something new, in the alternative perspective the page demands. But the challenge is to find that something. Maybe that means altering the real lived experience, sure. But maybe that something else is a rhetorical matter, or a tonal matter—finding and developing and deepening a new attitude toward a subject—or a matter of transformation. What does that transcription turn into? What does it become that it wasn’t before it met the world of art?
As for what I discovered in the process of writing these poems, many things! Some productive, some unproductive—I’ll try to narrow them down here.
Productive: I discovered that the poems really gravitated toward more interlocutors outside the convention of the title’s direct address. Originally, when writing the “Reader, I” poems, I thought that I would largely build a kind of one-sided conversation between speaker and addressee, that the you would be like a hole punched into the ceiling, letting a little outside light in, but that the poems would largely be claustrophobic interior spaces and monologues. And there’s still some of that left over. But then all these other people started coming in. At first it was just figures from literature, painting, history—building up a kind of lineage. Then it was like I had opened up some floodgate, and others poured in. Contemporary figures. Neighbors, hotel clerks, family members, strangers. And though it took me a while to see it, I think the poems, in their previous, shuttered-off myopia (a kind of mood I was really courting early on), didn’t reflect marriage in the way I wanted them too. Because marriage is never only about the spouses, but about everyone in their orbit. How could I write a book about marriage if I was closing the poems off from the exterior world? So I discovered the poems needed more outside light, more holes punched into that ceiling, more windows.
Unproductive (with a productive ending): Something that wasn’t my own discovery, but the discovery of the fabulous Editor-in-Chief of Sarabande, Kristen Renee Miller. She gave me such thoughtful, careful, incisive notes and edits on my manuscript, a really thorough reading, and one that was more helpful than I can even begin to articulate.
But that one thing that really stood out, because it’s something that I tell my students all the time, and something that I haven’t really struggled with in the past. Kristen pointed out how, in the “Reader, I” poems, I kept coming to this kind of grand ending, one that could sometimes tilt into the territory of the moralizing, or the summative or the didactic. I was horrified, looking back at some of the endings she had flagged, to see that she was right—in poems so driven by sound, I had that rhymed-couplet-like closure in mind (which often lends itself to the epigrammatic). My ear was overriding my brain! And it was such an important breakthrough when revising the poems, and they really opened up when I wasn’t reaching as hard for the sonic click of closure.
EG: Revising against, or investigating closure, is at the same time such an important motion throughout Reader, I on the idea level. There are so many missed moments for closure—so many women who are robbed of the closure of a second glance, or a look back, so many people who are abandoned, or whose love dooms them to an afterlife without resolution.
I noticed that your work exudes a particular tenderness for these left-behind figures. In “Mama V’s Basement Lounge,” there are the sorority girls handcuffed to frat boys in mock marriage. For the speaker, they evoke Dante’s portrait of Francesca da Rimini, who was murdered by her husband for her affair with Paolo, to whom she is chained forever in hell. Without Dante’s passage about her life, she may have been forgotten by history, yet the only record of her is how her desire doomed her. Then there’s Gilly, teen bowling alley attendant and namesake of “Gilly’s Bar & Grille,” whose father gives away her socks, who makes the speaker express a vow to “never leave another behind.” Gilly, who will move away, whose legacy will be her name inscribed on the bowling alley sign, the socks, the nights she gave to create “somewhere people would drive to, / in the dark.” We meet the Egyptian goddess Amunet, overshadowed by her husband Amun, “named, anyway, after the-invisible-one—silent-winged, asp-headed.” Later, there is the rabbit in pain outside the speaker’s house, the final motion of her and her husband turning away. Toward the end, the speaker tells us “Reader, I kept my name. No fastening. So I could not become shred.”
What draws you to these shreds, to the left-behind, the ignored, the doomed?
CVL: Oh, I love that you’ve shored all that together here, especially because I haven’t really thought about this until now.
So maybe there are a couple reasons I’m drawn to this, to them.
Part of it must have something to do with the anxiety that, once an I becomes part of a we, once a life is joined to another’s, once one is legally bound to another, on the other side of that space, in its potential rupture, one doesn’t just revert back to the solitary self. If marriage is a kind of transformation in its union (which, though I am extremely cynical, I really do believe in this transformation), then there’s another transformation hovering outside of it. I’m not trying to say that one, if they leave a marriage, is, like, stained or something. Absolutely not. But that it’s a space almost unimaginable, because that future possible self is unrecognizable to the version of the self before entering the union. So that attention to the left-behind probably is a kind of projection of that awareness.
Having more to do with the poems, though, is the fact that I did want there to be a sense of… audacity? I think audacity. A sense that the speaker, in her acknowledgement of the women, the wives, of history, of what she’s read, studied, digested, feared, imitated, ultimately turns away from them, still, into the institution, and narrative, of marriage. Because it would be too narrow, too knowing of a book to gather these figures and write a book that supposes one wiser, in the rejection of their lives. To have learned from them only a refusal feels far too simple. I hope the poems learn that within the possibility, within the privilege of refusal lies its own liberation (and the attendant joy).
EG: I really admire that sense of audacity, the bravery it took to not allow the book to settle into an easy rejection or acceptance of marriage—to write a collection that is both troubled by the way our institutions transform us, that understands the possibilities of refusal, yet searches for a way toward joy, love, and liberation anyway.
In “Reader, I [wore the past around my neck],” the speaker examines the ritual of the wedding day, observing both the weight of tradition—“Our vows were Roman. The color of my dress Antique.”—and the transcendent moments that ritual allows—”We stepped out of the designated day—flies hovering over our banquet of hot dogs, oiled chips—like stepping from a cooling bath. We emerged so into myth.” We hear Plato say, “The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love”; hear the speaker’s husband say, “what’s beautiful can kill us” while he helps her achieve the impossible: peeing while wearing a wedding dress.
Throughout, I’m struck by the contradictions you compress into each poem—between the sacred and profane, the mundane and the transcendent, the present and the history beneath it—as if embracing imperfection is the only way to imagine a possible life.
I’m curious about whether this is true for you as a poet too; we often pursue the perfect phrase, the measured line, the vivid image, yet language fails us, it has to. Readers often see a book as finished, or as the perfect vessel for the poems within. Is the book the end of the process for you? What is the ideal version of this collection?
CVL: That’s so true, what you say about imperfection. Not just that embracing it allows one to exist and endure (though there’s that too), but that it makes room for possibility.
And I really believe there is no perfect book, that once you’ve lived long enough inside whatever you’re writing, it’s impossible to cleanly cut ties with it. At least that’s how it is for me. A book is just one possibility—of course I try to commit to the possibility, to shape it as well as I can. But especially with a collection of poems, the decision of when a book is finished is so arbitrary. Sometimes because of the market, or because of what seems feasible within the constraints of the genre and the made artifact of the book, or because of academia, or because of exhaustion. Once a book is out in the world, I feel like we’re supposed to talk about it as though it’s some flawless artifact. Maybe some people do feel that way about their books—I never have.
The ideal version of this book would have included more poems outside the “Reader, I” prose poems. At one point I thought it would be entirely made up of those, and I did keep one section like that, to try to maintain some of that claustrophobia. As the book expanded, I knew I wanted more air, to move beyond those really tight domestic spaces. But I needed to avoid creating redundancies, and to not make a collection that was terribly long. It’s still longer than I would have liked, but I was going for tonal range. Still, I think the book is a little lopsided—a neater balance of prose poems and lineated poems would have made my eyes more content. But it was also just time to move on. There comes a point when I can’t access a manuscript any longer.
EG: Reader, I, as you mentioned earlier, is a departure from your last collection—you’ve said it surprised you to have written so deeply about love and marriage. It seems to me that you’re a poet interested in changing, trying new styles, voices, forms, and subjects, from book to book. Where is your work headed next? Is a new project underway?
CVL: I’m definitely interested in change from book to book—I like to learn alongside my poems, and once I’ve done one thing for the time it takes to make a manuscript, I’m ready to try, and to learn, something new. In my first three books, I think the change was also driven by the thematic overlap that persisted, despite saying after I finished each one, I’m not writing poems about love or my father anymore. Sigh.
But now I’m working on a manuscript that’s my biggest departure, and biggest challenge, yet, since except for one poem, the subject is never myself, never my life. The poems are entirely focused outward, so any I in the book isn’t my own. The manuscript revolves around solitude—its peaks and valleys, its extremes and affordances—especially in its role across the arts. There are a lot of long poems, too, where I’m trying to sit with a different voice for a little longer. It’s been a very welcome break!
EG: It must be exciting to be releasing Reader, I, a book so interested in the personal, with a project that ranges far from the personal in the works. I can’t wait to see where your next collection takes us. Thank you so much for talking with me, and for sharing such brilliant insights into Reader, I. And happy publication day again! Any last thoughts you’d like to leave our readers with?
CVL: Thank you, Evan, for your thoughtful questions and this wonderful conversation! It’s been such a pleasure getting to speak and think with you.
One last thought:
This morning, I saw the stunning portfolio on lovesickness that Aria Aber curated in The Yale Review. It’s full of my favorite poets! In the introduction to the folio, Aber writes: “these poems illustrate how love can shape us into tenderer and more attentive versions of ourselves.”
I wanted to end here because recently a student of mine was anxious about her poetic obsessions—she can’t stop writing poems about love, and she was worried that she should write about “more pressing” matters. I understand the anxiety, of course! But I also told her that if we allow the love poem to teach us about how we interact with others, with the world around us, that if we can attempt the seemingly impossible highwire act of transcribing deep feeling into language, then we are engaging in something necessary, something monumental—like you said about Shakespeare, hopefully creating something that will outlast us, and, eventually, become about more than us.
