Bio → Christian
Schlegel is the author of three books of poetry: Honest James,
ryman, and the newly-released The
Blackbird, published by Beautiful Days Press. He used to be a teacher,
is now studying to be a lawyer, and lives in New York.
Note → E is
Elena Saavedra Buckley, writer/editor, who conducted the interview using rmcl’s
language and added a few things.
1 - How did
your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to
your previous? How does it feel different?
The first
book, Honest James, helped me feel I was really Doing Poetry, and
I worked with a press (The Song Cave) which had impeccable taste, my own book
excluded––I was happy to be in that company and grateful to be connected with
other writers and have a career (in the cool and not straightlaced professional
way).
Those were the
biggest immediate things. Honest James like many books took a
minute to find readers; I didn’t register its publication right away, but now
it’s being translated into Spanish, which is mind-blowing, a special honor. My
most recent work is different in style and structure, but tonally I think it’s
similar.
E - What’s
the tone of Honest James, what’s the tone of the new book, and
how do they compare?
Honest
James is mostly poems
in received form from a fake past. Writing into other people’s voices … and
then also a sad humor … I have a hard time being funny when I’m “trying to be
funny,” but there’s a mordant and also muted, possibly depressive humor, can we
say that, in that book, and also in the talk poem books, ryman
and The Blackbird. The difference was: Honest James
was tight, compacted language; the talk poem books do the opposite, have
expansive, big nets of language … it sounds more like a kind of speech, the new
stuff. Honest James was extremely hard to read aloud from, and
maybe alienating to listen to live, but with the new books I’m reproducing a
speech-experience for people and maybe interpolating into it or riffing on it
when I’m up in front of a room. Honest James was a headphone
album, it turned out to be better for silent reading, is my theory.
2 - How did
you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I always liked
writing and assumed I’d try to be a novelist, not because I thought I could do
it, but because that’s what books were to me. I don’t have a good sense of
linearity, construction of character, plot; scenes make sense to me, I hope
there are some scenes in my books where people do things in space, but I have a
hard time chaining them together to build a fictive world and doing the
technical work a novelist has to do. I read them, novels, but I can’t do those
things.
I came to
poetry from the negated space of not being able to write prose fiction, then of
course I saw poetry had these opportunities that worked better, to the extent
they worked, with the way my mind is … I started to read more poetry … in
English class senior year in high school we read the Metaphysicals and I
thought, damn, holy moly, and then in college creative writing I started
reading American poetry and at that point I saw more and more that I loved
poetry, that it was everything to me. But I still wanted to write a fiction
thesis my senior year and as I remember it they were like, why not apply for
poetry? So I did that.
3 - How
long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing
initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking
close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
There’s a lot
of notes … it takes me a while to prewrite, and that’s the most challenging
period. I’m just at the beginning of that now, figuring out what to do, I like
that freedom but it’s stressful … the ideas kinda stick together in a Notes App
file, usually, then I worry about it for a while then I try to forget it and go
do something else, run errands, I’m seriously considering starting the most
basic yoga possible … then something jostles loose eventually and I write it
down as fast as I can and I’m missing stuff that’s leaking out of the thought
and that’s exciting.
Writing, my
friend and penpal Kate Briggs says, has to move somewhere, I guess that’s
Stevens, too, it has to have a Point A and Point B at minimum, usually I have
one of those but not the other, and once you have both the potential for the
path is opened and you walk it; you have to figure out the actual movement
inside it but you have a vector.
E - Before
you give a talk, how much do you determine how you’ll get from Point A to Point
B?
The best
possible outcome, which is not often what happens, is: you have an intuition
and then when giving the talk you realize a new thing or revise the intuition.
4 - Where
does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end
up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book"
from the very beginning?
Increasingly
the second one … with Honest James, it was fun mosaic-ing the
book together, I liked doing that, but recently the ideas percolate and I try
to find passageways and resonances … The Blackbird, for a long
time, was called Is This Skateboarding, which seemed like an important
theme in the book, but then I did “The Blackbird” part and realized that was
where I wanted things to land.
5 - Are
public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort
of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I remember
saying to a friend in my MFA, I don’t like reading my poems aloud, and he said
that was an indication that my poems should change so I could enjoy reading
them aloud.
E - Is
doing this interview aloud more about being comfortable or more an artistic
consistency thing?
That’s a good
question … in college I used to dictate drafts of papers sometimes, so for
drafting, yes it’s easier … for people of my cast of mind, who are obsessive
and/or compulsive, if I’m writing, writing is the most important thing, so then
I’m doing the most important thing possible and it becomes freighted, but talk
is cheap, you can do it without worrying about it, you’re not forcing yourself
into serious art.
6 - Do you
have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are
you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current
questions are?
If there’s a
big theoretical and unreachable concern, or I can’t reach it, it’s the problem
of the lyric poem, what’s the current state of the short portable non-epic
poem, is that a thing we should care about, inhabit, revise. Basically every
poet working now is operating under that sign.
Josh, one of
the Beautiful Days publishers, said before my reading in New York that he
thinks of me as having the Romantic cast of mind, which is nice, I hope that’s
right. Wordsworth is probably my favorite poet, if you could only give me one
for the rest of my life it would be him, followed closely by Ashbery, but
Ashbery would lose out because there’s stuff in Wordsworth’s poems that
happens, you can track it.
Now I’m in law
school and starting to think about how the law affects my thinking and what my
poems can do to loosen or linger in questions of law, that’s interesting to me,
but I can work that out consciously rather than implicitly, as with the Lyric
Problem which no one can solve.
7 - What do
you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even
have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I can’t
presume to have anything original to say here but I’d like to think that
writing, artmaking, that’s the creation of a mutual realm for a different kind
of experience with people, art allowing for a parallel dimension connected to
the world we live in, not totally distinct from it, situating itself
accordingly but with slightly different rules, whatever those are, not so
different from a game, which I talk about in the book in my dumb Wittgenstein
way, the game is related to art, related to life, but is probably distinct from
both.
Art that feels
entirely like a game, I find that dissatisfying, but art that’s a little bit a
game, a little bit a reflection of life, yet holding itself apart … I think
that’s true of anyone’s artistic practice right now, navigating these
categories. There’s so much work on these questions: what’s the difference
between my art life and the one I live outside art? Do I care about being
online versus not and explaining what that feels like? How much should I insist
on the difference between the places/modalities I live in? Maybe the answer is:
a little bit, a medium amount. But not totally, because then you’re a decadent
or a hermit.
8 - Do you
find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or
both)?
Editors are
essential and the best. I say this to my writer-editor girlfriend. I think
that, uhh, yeah, poetry, when you have a person who wants to edit it, edit you,
it feels really good! Because they’re reading you close. Poetry today is kinda
pre-edited through workshops, summer seminars, writing groups already, that’s
probably part of why editors are more deferential to writers at the book stage.
But Josh and George, my editors at Beautiful Days, are amazing, they helped me
see the book fully and pushed it to interesting places; they didn’t ask me to
do huge things, but they were always there.
9 - What is
the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Jim Galvin, my
teacher at Iowa, I don’t know who said this to him, in my brain it’s been a lot
of people: Writing isn’t work, it’s just really hard. That’s a huge difference.
I like thinking about artistic problems now, but when I was younger I used to feel
the burden, or what I thought to be the burden, of artmaking. But now it’s joy
to me and an actual privilege, so thinking of any part of that process––getting
started, being in the middle––it doesn’t always feel good, but it is ultimately
a source of play and joy. I don’t take it for granted as much as I did
before.
Of course I
get despairing about my art like everyone but that’s the ideal: an artistic
practice you love having and being in. Lots of people’s lives don’t allow for
it because of the excruciating inequality of the world … and if you’re dead
you’re not making art and can’t make it again. So you have to enjoy it now. And
then I try to have a practical life, maybe even a political life, but I don’t
always know how that intersects with the art, and that’s fine.
10 - What
kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does
a typical day (for you) begin?
I’ve had this
weird professional life: I was in graduate school, then a teacher for some
years plus the adjuncting and TAing, etc., then I decided to go to law school.
So I had a period when I was very busy, working and going to school at night;
now I’m a full-timer and thought I’d be less busy but I’m not really, so I want
to be writing, thinking, researching at 5% all the time. Maybe I’m deluding
myself, but I think it’s kinda true: every day I see what tiny problem I can
solve, but a lot of the time it doesn’t look like writing; I try to take the
anxiety seriously and channel it into an issue worth addressing and do that
over and over, so that’s the routine but sadly it’s not sitting down with
coffee in the morning.
Teaching was
helpful for learning to be a performer, how to ask questions and listen and
answer. I also had the privilege of working at a school that’s artistically
inclined, so there was broad support for the idea that as a teacher you also
had an art life, but for me that was turning into standing up in front of
people anyway and talking.
11 - When
your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a
better word) inspiration?
I guess I’m a
little bit of a jerkish Oulipian on this and don’t believe in inspiration per
se, I think of it as pernicious even. There’s no inspiration––just ideas and
trying them, and knowing or sensing when they work or not, exploring and
abandoning. But of course everything is inspiring in the general sense which is
how a more charitable man than me would have answered the question, walking
around New York, movies, wine, baseball, the good things.
12 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
There were
good smells in Reading, PA. It’s beautiful where I’m from, vaguely pastoral and
a little haunted-looking, and there were lots of different grass and mud smells
that were a huge part of my life. Happy Hollow Park, I remember what that
smelled like.
13 - David
W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms
that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Nature does
not figure in my work in any taxonomic sense, which is an embarrassment. My
dear friend Jake Fournier, who I’m shouting out now (buy his book!),
has the ability to ID plants in nature. Or birdwatching … I can’t do that
stuff. I love being outside, and it’s interesting to me as a source of
phenomena, but I don’t have curiosity about the names and have been ashamed of
this in the past, because I felt, like many poets I bet, the obligation to
learn the flowers and trees, perhaps the animals eventually, but I won’t.
14 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
Poetically
it’s my closest Iowa buddies––we have a group chat called The Gay Science,
formerly The Merry Company: Jess Laser (of The Goner School fame),
Jake Fournier, and Dan Poppick. We went to Iowa together and we talk about
writing; we have a bond, I don’t know how else to describe it, and it’s the
most urgent place for me to share writerly info, in addition to the friendship.
I want to share work with them. And then the concentric circles of other
amazing people in a city or via MFAs or publishing … you want to listen to
their opinions, too, esp. if they’re different from those of The Gay Science.
You want to be interesting to each other but not so insular that you forget
what’s going on beyond your little team. But when we formalized the chat during
the pandemic it felt right.
15 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would love
to write a novel––love is a strong word––but it would be interesting. How do
you even do that today? My friend Dan, above, wrote a beautiful novel called The
Copywriter (order
it!), and it’s inspiring to see poets do that and find their way into the
form. It would be humbling to write one and be bad at it but that’s like
everything else. I’d love to make a movie––of course I have no technical skills
on that score.
16 - If you
could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately,
what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’m grateful
to have had two distinct careers. I didn’t love being a student so much as
being a teacher, which I truly loved and continue to. I didn’t get my fill of
teaching when I switched to the law but I love the law, too.
I don’t know
how I made the decision to switch; I basically woke up one day and decided, but
that means I must have been thinking about it a long time. Lawyers are
compulsive and punctilious and the stakes are high, but they’re also making
claims that don’t hold water and losing all the time. Even when you think you
have it down, there’s something that eludes you, and I find that fascinating,
the ideal of zealous representation that essentially has no bounds, but you’re
also a mortal. Law school exams are impossible and unlike anything else I’ve
studied for, because you memorize a bunch of stuff re: what the law is then
apply that to facts in a short period of time. I’ve never had to do that
before.
17 - What
made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I remember I
had a teacher who said, it’s nice to have a sense of project in your life.
Something separate from your job and your personal life, a third space for your
brain. It’s the Starbucks of your brain. I realized I guess that art could be a
thing different from your job/work, and different from your friends and family,
and I went toward that.
18 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great
film has to be Twin Peaks, all of it. You and I watched the whole
of it recently. It’s the great American artwork of the last however many years.
It’s so insane, brilliant, and sad and scary, and stilted. Everyone said the
third season was the best of them all and I said there’s no way that could be
true, but it was, it’s so disquieting and our Moby Dick.
And I like how Lynch did his thing, as a guy who pretended to just be this
folksy smiling doofus. A holy fool. Fantastic.
Last great
book: Hard Rain Falling, which you also recommended to me. By Don
Carpenter, I was gonna say Gary Johnson, another midcentury white guy name.
That book is so amazing, there’s a little bit of Lynch in there, the moody
America. Subtraction, by Mary Robison, which poet Sarah Trudgeon
put into my hands a long time ago and I’ve shared with many people since.
Farnoosh Fathi, Granny Cloud; Emily Skillings, Sara Deniz Akant,
Margaret Ross, Zan de Parry, Dan Wriggins, Kate Briggs.
19 - What
are you currently working on?
Becoming a
lawyer and another, uhhh, book. Each will take about … a year to figure out, or
two years, even just finding a job and getting traction on the poems or their
ideas. I wanna write criticism but it seems so hard. And I want to interview
people, because I like being interviewed, thank you for doing it.
12 or 20 (second series)
questions:
