Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She serves as the poetry editor of Amulet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Malia Maxwell (MM): There’s a polyvocal quality to Hard Damage that I really admire. Your poems are not only interested in what family members say, but how they say them. And, of course, your work is very intertextual, bringing in direct quotation. What prompts you to assign direct speech to somebody in a poem instead of to describe it?
Aria Aber (AA): That’s such a good question. I’m interested in a choral quality in poetry, which is something that I’ve borrowed from documentary poetics, mainly, even in my lyrical work. It’s closer to the way speech works in real life. And that is what I’m invested in bringing across on the page. I also think it creates a more democratic texture within the poem.
MM: I appreciate the way that your poems ask questions: “Where are you from? Who am I kidding? Why did I flinch?” I’d love to hear more about what you’re thinking when you turn to questions in a poem. In particular, I’m interested in the dance between knowing, discovering, and being unable to know what’s at play.
AA: I love that question. I turn to questions in my work constantly. And I think that actually questions are what compel me to write in the first place. I turn towards poetry or writing to figure out things that I don’t know. Oftentimes, the poem doesn’t answer that question or that problem or solve it, but I end up with more questions afterwards, which is fine. I really like to embrace that. I know and understand that technically every question in a poem or in a piece of writing is rhetorical because it’s not a real question. But, oftentimes, those questions do feel real to me. They’re often quite unanswerable to myself. So I think of it almost as a psychoanalytic quest, you know?
MM: What are the types of questions that come up when you’re writing a poem?
AA: It really varies. I can’t give a comprehensive answer right now, but something that you just mentioned—the “Why did I flinch?” question—is not from myself. It was a quote from Merrill. That one has really stayed with me because I can’t quite answer why I flinched in that moment or in that time period in my life, regarding the addressee of the poem. Those are, I think, very human regrets sometimes that I have and where you look back at how you behaved at a certain moment or how you treated another person or were treated by them, or why they’re still facets of yourself that you don’t understand. Maybe those are quite obvious to other people from the outside, but the human psyche is a quite interesting thing. It’s full of self deception.
MM: I’ve noticed that, in Hard Damage as well as after, many of your poems’ titles mention place: “Reading Rilke in Berlin,” “Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin,” and, more recently, “Oakland in Rain.” Of course your work is explicitly interested in place and what it means to be of a place, but I’m curious about what it means for you to bring that attention to the title of the poem.
AA: The title of a poem is quite an interesting place because it does a lot of work for you. You know, a lot of people think of titles as decorative or think about the title later on. Most of the time, I already have a title in mind when I write the poem, and the title kind of anchors me—almost like a thesis prompt or an abstract for myself or the work of art that I’m attempting to create.
When I was younger, I dreamed of becoming the kind of person who would name nail polish colors. I worked at American Apparel for a while and I was really interested in the names of the t-shirt colors there. I know now that that’s just what copywriters do—or someone who’s internally hired. Or sometimes even just someone who has nothing to do with poetry or language is coming up with those names. But I was always interested in the interplay and the tension between the descriptive aspects of a title and a piece of art—or an object like a textual object in the case of a poem—and how they interact with each other, how a title can challenge something, how it can situate it, how it can really anchor us in a geographic place, but also give some kind of like atmospheric sheen or tint. I’m interested in the tension between the title and the body of the poem and place is something that is incredibly important to me.
Also, the “Oakland in Rain” poem: I wrote a piece of writing called “Oakland in Rain” before I had ever seen California, and the poem is a thematizing that. So there is an interplay with that, too, like “why am I drawn to the names of places” and I think it has something to do with growing up in exile.
MM: I’d love to know what’s been bringing surprise into your poems.
AA: I think most of the time it’s just allowing yourself to listen to your intuition, whatever that is, because I think every writer has their own music. You have to follow your own music and listen to it—the music of your language, the music of your line, the music of your speech.
Other things that allow for surprises to occur while I’m writing are extensive reading—and reading things from the past, not just contemporary stuff. I’m rereading Anna Karenina right now, and it’s changing my consciousness, I feel like. I haven’t read that since I was a teenager. I like being immersed and kind of taken with something so that it occupies my brain entirely. Not to cannibalize another writer or be derivative, but I do think that sometimes reading something that’s completely out of your wheelhouse or that you haven’t visited in a long time, like such a classic as Tolstoy, will provide you with new ideas or create a different rhythm for your thinking and ultimately for your work.
One thing that I keep telling my students also, and which I’m kind of bad at doing myself, is to keep an observation notebook and to write down physical things that you experience in a day, whether it’s seeing a blue chair or the way light filters through a glass of water or listening to two people speak and writing down how you heard them. That allows you to see the world as a kind of text and to see the text also as a kind of world. I think that’s incredibly important because it sounds like it creates a sensitivity and a sensibility to pause and to really observe things. I think that’s important for poetry, but it also is often surprising to then understand why you’re drawn to certain things and not others.
MM: In other interviews, you’ve talked about beauty and your poetry. You specify thinking about that as a sort of sonic lushness in one way. I’m curious what role beauty—be it sonic lushness or otherwise—has in Good Girl.
AA: Beauty has a big role in Good Girl, too. I think that’s just my style of writing. Maybe it will change one day, but at the moment, it’s just the way I experience the world and I can’t really change that. As I said earlier, everyone has their own music and I feel like mine is, unfortunately, sonically dense and very chaotic and lush. But it has a big role and I often like to juxtapose beauty against violence.
Good Girl is set in Berlin, which is not a particularly beautiful city. It’s a cacophonous city. And that kind of cacophony, I think sonically, but also imagistically and in terms of content I’m really interested in. It’s a political book. By that I mean it has a political backdrop and it’s thinking through political ideas or observing them. There is a lot of intensity of emotion because it’s also a bildungsroman. I feel like a certain aspect of linguistic lushness or beauty is inevitable just by virtue of how I write. But otherwise, I think the natural world is not experienced as extremely beautiful in Good Girl or the backdrop of the architecture because it’s Berlin. It’s, I think, a rather ugly city. I mean, I love that place, but beautiful is not what I would call it.
MM: You said “unfortunately sonically dense.” Would you explain more about the relationship to that denseness?
AA: I mean, I appreciate it a lot. But I do think that, for certain American audiences, sonic lushness can be alienating because we’re on a hangover of Hemingway and clear and concise prose, even though Hemingway also wrote very lush sentences. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a good example of how you should write a very clean and severe sentence or line. But I did notice a difference between living in the UK and living in the US and what kind of writing people are drawn to, what kind of writing people praise. I think, in the US, a very simple style is often preferred or thought of as more cerebral, even though I’m more interested in a boxy and latinate syntax, which influences my writing, but also asks more of the reader. A simple style is easier to follow and has its own virtues, and sometimes I’m really drawn to that. I just can’t write like that.
MM: As poets we’re very observant, and I think we tend to appreciate beauty. I think naturally that can introduce beautiful and lush sounds into a poem, but it’s also something that you can be more attentive to: learning meter, learning rhyme, expanding your vocabulary. What’s the balance between intuition like you described earlier and writing towards a sound versus a more self-aware craft practice?
AA: I think they influence each other. I think you have to listen to your intuition. But also, I think, erudition is incredibly important and will ultimately expand your intuitive abilities because it will seep into your subconscious and thus affect the way you write. But also, I’m an avid reader, I’m incredibly obsessed with discipline. You know, I think of writing almost as a muscle that you can really work on. Being a learned writer can make you ultimately a better writer. I don’t think it can ever make you a worse writer.
MM: Do you have any recommendations for students who want to think more about their sonics in their poetry? It could be a craft book or it could be a poet or a novel that you really love.
AA: Well, first of all, reading widely and then understanding why you are drawn to certain sounds rather than others. If there is a poet that you particularly like and you want to imitate their sound—or you don’t even want to imitate their sound but you want to learn like why are you drawn to this kind of music—a good way would be to let them just analyze their writing and try to scan it and read it out loud and map out the syntax and see whether it’s like hypotactic or paratactic, where the line breaks, whether there are more consonances or more assonances present, where the rhyme is located within the poem. Just analyzing it deeply will help you understand what it is that you’re drawn to, break it down, and maybe provide you with the tools to then use it in your own work. I really like Sylvia Plath for her music. I like the modernists a lot. I like TS Eliot, despite his politics. I also really, really like Paul Celan, the German writer. I think those are great for sonic information. More contemporarily, I think Maggie Millner is great—Couplets, which is rhyming. Megan Fernandez also has kind of a lush quality in her work, but is incredibly smart and funny. And Sandra Lim. Those are writers I recommend.
MM: Is there a music to Anna Karenina that’s been standing up to you with this read?
AA: That’s a really good question and I can’t answer that properly because I’m in between reading two different translations. One is the Constance Garnett translation, which is the one I think that’s most well known and the older one, and the language sounds a little archaic, which I like. And then I’m reading a more recent translation that is more modern and the music is slightly different. This is kind of a nerdy answer to that question. I think there is just a 19th century rhythm to the thought that I find expansive and riveting but also a little meandering and it slows down time. Which is something that we’re really not used to anymore because our chapters have become so much shorter. Anna Karenina’s chapters are also very short, but the novel is so incredibly long. Something like that, in our attention-deficit economy, doesn’t really work anymore. There’s a length and a length and a slowness to it that I really appreciate.
MM: I’m not sure if I’m just more attentive to [publishing trends] because I’m now in an MFA or if there’s actually an uptick in poets with agents. I noticed that you have an agent. I’ve also noticed a few other Stegner Fellows now have agents, but they seem to only be putting poetry out. Is that where poetry is heading? What does an agent do when you’re a poet?
AA: I’m with my incredible agent, Bill Clegg, and I sought him out when I had finished the manuscript draft for my novel. I think there are a lot of poets with agents nowadays because the economy of publishing is changing slightly. It’s harder to get book prizes. It’s harder to get published in certain places. And there’s also more money to be had within poetry.
Some of the bigger publishing houses now publish poetry, which they weren’t doing regularly before—or not for younger poets. I think a lot of people are interested in debut poets, for example, Penguin Poets, the series; Scribner is doing poetry now; Hogarth is putting up poetry; I think, Echo. There are a lot of places where they offer publishing contracts to poets and younger poets. I think nowadays writers know that they can benefit from having an agent who will mediate between them and the publishing house and will look over the contract, which is often kind of obtuse and not always benefiting the poet. You don’t know that you can ask for certain things, which an agent often will help you do, which is great. But otherwise, I don’t know why. We’re in a strange moment. Publishing is changing. People have external publicists. People have external editors. Yeah, poets have agents. It’s very curious to me, too.
MM: I also noticed that when Good Girl was sold to Hogarth it was a two-book deal with a novel and a book of poetry. I haven’t really seen that before. Is that also one of the newer directions that we’re heading in with more publishers publishing poetry—that people are willing to buy two different genres at once?
AA: I think that’s not that uncommon. It’s common that you sell a short story collection and a novel or a memoir and a novel. I mean those are prose. But for people who work in poetry and have a second manuscript, I think it’s common. Not that we have that many poet-novelists, but among the ones that we have—I’m thinking of Ocean, who published his novel and then his second poetry collection was Penguin—I do think that publishers are more interested in and putting up poetry because readers are more interested in reading poetry and purchasing poetry. I feel like there has been a kind of Renaissance in poetry publishing. Even though I often talk about how there is no money at all within poetry, I do think we’re at an interesting moment where it’s changing slightly. Not for everyone because we have a lot of writers in the world, especially in this country. But I do think it’s an exciting development.
MM: Do you have any wishes for this poetry Renaissance?
AA: I mainly want writers to be paid well and for poets to be paid as much as they deserve, so that we can have less constraints, less competitive envy. But another thing that I wish for the poetry Renaissance is that people read more poetry—that that’s not just an illusion that I’m making up, but that people actually read more poetry and that poetry can enter the mainstream consciousness the same way that novels do.
