12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christian Schlegel

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: