12 or 20 (second series) questions with Robert van Vliet

Robert van Vliet grew up in the Twin Cities and spent many years living in lots of other places. His poetry has appeared in The Sixth Chamber Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Guesthouse, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook, This Folded Path, (above/ground press, 2023) and Vessels (Unsolicited Press, 2024). He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, Ana.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I’m not sure my life has changed all that much, really. My daily life as a writer is exactly the same as it ever was. I’m still asking myself, What the hell am I doing? How am I doing it? Is this a poem? Is it finished? Do I try to put it out into the world, or just put it in a drawer? I write because I write. I share the results of my work when I can, but if I didn’t enjoy simply sitting in a room banging words around, then I would have moved on to something else by now.

As for how the poems in This Folded Path and Vessels compare to my previous work, they were all composed over a fairly brief period of time, using a very specific set of constraints, which I think gave them a greater unity of tone and character. I had never sustained such a focused a project like this for such a length of time so, even though I’m sure they bear a resemblance to older poems, they mark the deepest dive into a particular set of “theoretical concerns” (see below) that I’ve ever consciously, deliberately maintained.

Oh okay, y’know, now that I’ve been thinking about it, maybe my debut chapbook and debut full-length (which were accepted for publication within weeks of each other after about fourteen years of submitting manuscripts to presses with no success) actually did kinda change my life: Having them published was a startling and unprecedented recognition of the work I do.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Of all the various artistic pursuits that I’ve blundered through, poetry was the very last. The first writing I was drawn to was fiction, all the way back in elementary school. I goofed around with poetry in high school, but I never quite took it seriously until after I began writing songs in college. Eventually, and rather unconsciously, poetry eclipsed songwriting and fiction.

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?

Because I have a regular (though not always daily) practice of “doodling” in a notebook, I’m never short of raw materials from which to build poems. In fact, I probably have more raw material than I’ll ever be able to process. All too often, I fail to revisit what I’ve written, opting instead to keep moving forward with new things. I have several bankers boxes of spiral notebooks that still need to be looked through. And I recently uncovered a manuscript of several hundred prose poems I wrote about twenty years ago and then promptly forgot about.

I’ve always been pretty quick with the first drafts, but how long it takes to arrive at something resembling a final draft has varied wildly over the years. Sometimes I’ve just dropped the thing as soon as it felt even slightly “coherent,” while other times I’ve rewritten something a dozen times or more, playing with different line breaks, swapping words over and over like lens settings at the optometrist. On and on. For a long time, I would throw fragments together and then come up with connecting tissue to bridge the gaps. But sometimes I would just leave the gaps. (Less “first thought best thought” and more “no thought best thought.”

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?

Poems usually begin with scraps of sounds or some sort of language game. The larger project, if there is one, almost always emerges after at least some, if not all, of the poems have already been written. I have, from time to time, written with larger projects in mind, but I don’t think I’ve ever started with the goal of “writing a book.”

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings aren’t exactly part of my process, but the performative aspect of poetry is very important to me, and I always write with an ear for how a poem might sound when read aloud. I came to poetry from the performing arts (theater and music) so I’ve always thought of the text of a poem as somewhat analogous to a script or score, and that the reading of the text (aloud or otherwise) is part of what completes the work. This also means that I don’t think that my performance of one of my poems is canonical: It’s perfectly likely that someone else might be better at interpreting the text. And yes, I enjoy doing readings.

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? 

I think I probably do have theoretical concerns, but there’s a sign over my desk that reads: “The work speaks for itself.” This, to me, means that anything I might say about my work would be something like a paraphrase — and I don’t believe art can be paraphrased because I don’t believe art is necessarily trying to say anything. And I certainly don’t think I am a greater authority on my own work than anyone else, so my own theoretical concerns are unlikely to shed any valuable light on it. I’d be much more interested in hearing about what someone else sees in my work.

And, assuming that speaking of art in terms of “questions” and “answers” has any usefulness or validity at all, I think I’m much more interested in figuring out how exactly to ask the questions, because if we don’t understand our questions, we definitely won’t understand whatever answers we might stumble upon.

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?

To consider other possibilities; to question the simple and the seemingly obvious; to reveal the strange within the familiar, and the familiar within the strange. No writer should insult anyone’s intelligence, but every writer must constantly challenge the willfully ignorant.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential. I’ve been lucky so far that the editors I’ve worked with had a very light hand, and my work passed through them and into print with very little in the way of corrective surgery. I’d like to think this is partly because I’ve worked as an editor myself and I try to hand in as clean a copy as possible. I’ve welcomed and generally enjoyed working with editors; and I would have been open to considering substantial edits or revisions that helped clarify the work. It is the mark of an insecure, immature writer who resists any editorial input. No one’s perfect, and nothing exists in isolation. Everything is connected to everything else, so how others react to your work: that’s everything. Why wouldn’t you want to have an early sense of how your work might be interpreted or misunderstood?

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly

Trust your luck, but don’t forget to put our your nets.

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?

Early mornings are generally the best time for me to write, so I try to wake up early enough to give myself a good stretch before the day starts its supplications. But it isn’t unwaveringly consistent. And in the last two or three years, it’s been annoyingly sporadic. Depending on my other work commitments, I might snatch twenty minutes around lunchtime or in the late afternoon. Mostly, I just try to make sure I’m leaving at least a little time each day fenced off from other concerns.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

The only times I’ve ever felt genuinely stalled had nothing to do with the writing itself and everything to do with work or life commitments monopolizing my attention and energy. As long as I’ve been able to carve out a little time, I’ve been able to get back into it fairly easily.

But I should add that sometimes the blank page can be a little intimidating, especially if I’m coming back to writing after what feels like a long while (days, months, whatever). So I’ll tell myself I’m just fooling around, that it’s no big deal. I let myself off the hook by spending my writing time simply describing whatever I’m seeing or hearing. Crows, clouds, coffee mug, whatever. Just any stupid shit that tumbles out. Now there’s some dumb writing on the page, something has begun, and I have a baseline of mediocre to surpass.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cold air over snow with a note of thaw to it. Also, loamy air through the metallic tang of a window screen after a thunderstorm.

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?

Music, definitely. Also history, archaeology, comparative religion, and psychology.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? 

I kind of dread being asked this sort of question. I’m certain I’ll forget someone, or I secretly worry that I’ll include someone who’s less of an influence and more of a name-drop, just to seem cooler than I am. (I am, in fact, not remotely cool.) But the fact is, when I was younger, this was the way I made discoveries: writers mentioning their favorite books or biggest influences, etc.

So in that spirit, here’s a laughably incomplete list, in no particular order, of a few books and writers that have, at one time or another, been enormously important and influential to me and the kind of work I try to do:

Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm, John Cage, Elaine Pagels, Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas, Robert Bringhurst (both as typographer and poet), the Copper Canyon anthology A Gift of Tongues, Jung’s alchemical writings, Tom Phillips’ A Humument, Thoreau, Epictetus, Han Shan, Guy Davenport, Thomas Pynchon, Morgan’sTarot, Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Judith Sklar’s Ordinary Vices, Mary Midgley, Russell Hoban (especially The Medusa Frequency and Kleinzeit), Arthur Sze, Hayden Carruth, Joanne Kyger, Jim Harrison, Muriel Rukeyser, Odd Bodkins, Victor Mair’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?

Live above the Arctic Circle for a year.

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?

Anthropologist or paleontologist. And if I weren’t a writer, I probably would have ended up being a writer.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I love playing with pencils and I love how paper takes ink. I also love letter forms and typefaces. A writer is also, among other things, a performance artist, comedian, philosopher, musician, seer, and scientist, so writing is doing something else. Also, I like sentences.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

I haven’t been much of a film person recently. I’m mostly watching harmless, heavily formulaic police procedurals, cozy murder mysteries, or old familiar TV shows that I’ve already seen many times. Oh, but I finally saw La Jetée for the first time last year and it lived up to, or possibly exceeded, its reputation.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve been working on getting all the books out of my basement office and onto shelves upstairs after we had some minor but deeply unsettling flooding problems. Books, it turns out, are heavy and I regret not having bought a house with an elevator or dumb waiter or something.

Oh, you mean like writing and stuff? Well, I recently finished some of the first poems I’ve written in a few years. As I was editing and revising them, I was trying to discern whether they were a small collection of thirty stand-alone things or the beginning of a new, very long project. (Or both.)

By “very long” I mean that if I were to follow the recipe that built the first thirty poems through some chance operations, I would be embarking on a series that would run to a total of 2,156 poems. But if you’re on a vast mosaic floor, and you wish to step on each tile only once, chance can’t help you: you will almost certainly select the same tile again, potentially many times, unless you remove it from the pool of options somehow. I finally struck on the solution of using a Knight’s Tour that stitches together eleven 14x14 boards to determine my route, step by step, through the source material. Good grief, randomness takes so much planning! But now the path knows where I’m going, but I don’t. Perfect!

So I guess I have my work cut out for me — right after I finish loading the new bookshelves in the living room.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;