Kevin Prufer : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

I believe that music in poetry is often paraphrase-able and is sometimes at its best when it works in counterpoint (or in opposition) to what any summary of the poem might suggest the poem is about.  I love the way Emily Dickinson’s profound ambivalence about the nature (or existence) of the divine comes couched in the music of hymn meter.  Is the hymn meter ironic?  Or does it create a musical backdrop of faith against which the poem works out its doubts?  And what to make of the complex syncopation of “The Weary Blues” or “Not Waving But Drowning,” one paraphrase-able rhythm and tune interrupting and undercutting the previous one.  Poems have melodies, though it takes some study to learn how to describe the qualities of melody.  Still, music is inseparable from poetry; without it, there is no poetry.

Kevin Prufer : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

My ninth book is now under contract.  And each book is harder to write than the previous one because I am always trying to change my voice, my style, my interests.  I’m afraid of being predictable.  I don’t want a reader to pick up my next book, wrinkle her nose, and say, oh, him again? But I’m not sure how many modes and voices I have in me, not sure how long I can go on without being repetitive.  Usually, I try to write something that isn’t poetry between my poetry books as a way of cleaning out my mind.  For a while, I wrote mystery stories—whodunits—which I published here and there in magazines and anthologies poetry readers weren’t likely to encounter.   It was refreshing to write those, to write with the purpose of entertaining and not feel pressure to be meaningful.  And then, after a while, I’d return to poetry with new concerns and, I hope, a somewhat different voice.

Kevin Prufer : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Here’s one:  There are so many kinds of silence available to poets that are unavailable to writers or prose or to painters or sculptors or even musicians.  We have the silence of the line break, of the stanza break.  The silence of white space.  Of the punctuated caesura and the unpunctuated caesura.  We have the vast silence that comes at the end of the poem.  These silences are so versatile and, well deployed (well arranged) contain within them a kind of music, patterns of silence.  Sometimes these silences suggest the dramatic pauses of a speaker who falters, looks for the right word, creates suspense or tension.  Sometimes they are the silences of a mind at work on a problem—moments where the mind rests in unarticulated thought before thought arrives at articulation and the words begin again.  I am increasingly fascinated by qualities of silence, the white page. 

Kevin Prufer : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I began writing poetry before I knew much about it.  I wanted to write a kind of Romantic lyric because I had been reading Wordsworth and Keats and was attracted to their complex resolutions, their confidence in the existence of some complex truth that might be reached through nature and thought.  I still see the value in that, but I’ve lately become much more interested in the way a poem might tell a story, might invent characters and follow them, how the defining quality of a narrative poem is not that it offers the reader a series of events, but that it manipulates the speed and quality of the passage of time.   These days, poems have become a way that I can explore the world of the not-me, the world of other characters responding within time to unlikely circumstances.

Kevin Prufer : part one

Kevin Prufer’s seventh book How He Loved Them (Four Way Books, 2018) received the Julie Suk Award and was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.  His eighth book, The Art of Fiction, was published this year by Four Way Books.  He teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston where he also curates the Unsung Master Series, a book series devoted to bringing great, forgotten authors to new generations of readers.

Photo credit: Emy Johnston

How did you first engage with poetry?

I went to a classy boarding school—ivy-covered red brick, wealthy kids, grave faculty masters who doled out punishments for dress code violations and other misbehaviors.  We ate dinner in our green school ties beneath ancient portraits of faculty masters of the past.  I had one teacher who required that we memorize a poem each week.  Every Saturday, we sat in class and wrote the poem out longhand.  For each error—a missed comma, a forgotten word—we lost a grade.  And every poem he gave us was longer than the previous one.   I’m not sure what the objective of all this was.  Perhaps we were meant to learn comma rules this way, because no one could memorize the placement of every comma in “My Last Duchess”; one had to know the rules.  I don’t think these assignments awakened any interest in the other students, most of whom seemed to me to be destined to go on to great jobs in banking, medicine, or law.  And I complained like everyone else, though the poems took root inside me and grew there.  The rhythms, the odd rhymes, the wonderful pair of ragged claws scuttling across the silent sea floor.