A Conversation with Matt Donovan, Blackbird

So it is something that I am wary of, that the poems can be redundant in books if the project becomes too cohesive and too locked into stone. A lot of it grew out of what my passions and interests might be. For me, one of the real pleasures of developing this book was learning about myself and my own ideas about whatever subject matter had caught my interest as I developed the poems. So a lot of them were biographies, historical events, that somehow seized my imagination, and yet the imagination was working far ahead of me and it was only through the course of revision, and even through the course of finding its placement in the book, that I started to understand what these works were about for me.

I actually broke my wrist writing that poem. I had been working for several hours, I suddenly, I think I was in the shower, I suddenly understood something I needed to do with that poem. I came racing back in; I sat on the back of a chair and fell over as I was writing it and literally broke my wrist writing that poem, which I was pretty incredulous at, and it was embarrassing. The other reason why that poem is placed where it is in the book is, given the nature of some of the narratives I am exploring there, given the some of the discussions of art and human nature that come up in the course of the book, when I ended on that gesture of that woman in the Muybridge photograph kneeling to the chair . . .

The book in its very first version was called The Keeper of Hands . It was called Instrumental Gods . It was called St. Catherine in an O, and I was told that would be complicated simply in trying to describe what it was that title even referred to. Vellum in some ways serves the same purpose without that complication of just articulating “in an O” as a title. Those practical considerations of titling were not things I’d ever had to consider before, so I felt like there were variables that had never been brought forward to me that I suddenly was having to contend with.

And I think he is right to say that. I think it is also not an easy thing to say as well. It is difficult, and expensive, and time-consuming to be assembling these manuscripts and sending them out to the competitions. For better or worse, it is the venue for us first-book poets, more or less. But I think he is right to say that good work will eventually get through. And what is implicit in that one word for me, too, is this idea of being able to take a step back, being able to have real self-evaluation, and being able to assess the poems at hand. And then, what maybe is not implicit in that one word, too, is the need for tenacity, the need for self-drive and discipline, and keeping at it despite whatever feedback or arbitrary proximities you are getting to getting the book published as well.

In terms of creative writing classes, I am so inspired by the students that I encounter, at their best, at the undergraduate level where I teach. There are students who are wildly talented, I feel—way beyond where I was as an undergraduate—and so that, for me, is incredibly inspirational to encounter. Not only raw talent but a sense of tenacity, a drive to work, and a real sense of discipline and commitment, and that is really important for me to see, too. And then, of course, it is that dialogue, it’s that dynamic, and that community in the workshop classroom, when it is working at its best, where I am learning about my own process, my own work as a writer, as we are discussing whatever it is that’s before us on the page. And that fluid exchange of ideas about craft, about strategies for a poem, all of that is constantly fuelling me, at its best, as a writer, too. I won’t mention things like committee work and other distractions that do at times derail the creative process, but, at its best, I feel as if that’s how it’s serving me.

I felt an intimacy of tone there—I don’t mean that to sound in any way sentimental—but I did feel this intimacy of tone, of speaking, that immediately seized me. I can vividly remember standing there in the bookstore and just cracking open that spine and arbitrarily reading whatever first poem it was and feeling that engagement, feeling as if someone was directly whispering into my ear, and being rattled by that and thrilled by that. As I said last night, he is a writer I am constantly still learning from, and returning to, and coming to terms with, especially in those late elegies, all the time. And I find him always fascinating, always rewarding, for me.

And then you get to this sense of Levis and the ecphrastic, of his willingness to springboard off the work and to transcend the inevitable silence of that piece. To engage with a narrative that is entirely of his making, and then—it always is deeply satisfying for me to takes those journeys with him—and then he still will come back to the ways in which the silence of the piece is inevitable and can only reveal the human up to a point. At the end of his great poem about the Koudelka photographs, it ends with “he turned into paper,” and we are left with the moment of Keats trying to approach the urn and that idea of silence. We have these different strategies that we can find our way into these things, and then we have the inevitable ways in which we are shut out of them, and every time it is a kind of singular journey through that engagement or lack thereof.