{"id":16176,"date":"2015-11-02T11:00:57","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T16:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michiganquarterlyreview.com\/?p=16176"},"modified":"2015-11-02T11:00:57","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T16:00:57","slug":"bent-beneath-the-low-heavens-an-interview-with-dan-rosenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.lsa.umich.edu\/mqr\/2015\/11\/bent-beneath-the-low-heavens-an-interview-with-dan-rosenberg\/","title":{"rendered":"Bent Beneath the Low Heavens: An Interview with Dan Rosenberg"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Rosenberg is a deeply curious poet, experimental, playful, always pushing after new forms and approaches. It\u2019s evident in the books he has published, each of which expresses new talents, from the image-and-voice-driven pieces of The Crushing Organ<\/em> to the tight and angular poems of cadabra<\/em> to the exuberant sublimity of his latest chapbook, Thigh\u2019s Hollow<\/em>, which has just come out from Omnidawn. His successes with reinvention give any poet exhausted with \u201cfinding one\u2019s voice\u201d a refreshing new outlook: the voice is always right in front of you, part of whatever project you are pursuing.<\/p>\n

He is a generous poet and a great conversationalist, and we had a chance for a quick couple of exchanges that got right to it, ranging from Eliot to Wittgenstein, from Nintendo to the Song of Solomon<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Some things are known<\/em>
\n only by their limits,<\/em>
\n some can\u2019t be stared into<\/em>
\n or out of. The slick heart<\/em>
\n of the sun. The sun\u2019s<\/em>
\n turbulent heart.<\/em>
\n In the party of our system<\/em>
\n I\u2019m eccentric on the outskirts<\/em>
\n and declassified, a limit<\/em>
\n repeatedly breached.<\/em>
\n I swing close to what<\/em>
\n I want to see, say hey,<\/em>
\n I touch an arm and the arm<\/em>
\n doesn\u2019t jiggle. It\u2019s<\/em>
\n a banister. My voice<\/em>
\n fits into the dance beat<\/em>
\n like a name<\/em>
\n on a grain of rice.<\/em> 1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

It seems to me a primary question at the heart of a lot of your work is about the limits of what we can see and how we can speak\u2014the limits of image and language, the blurred edge of resonance. This might class you as an experimentalist, or a surrealist, but behind these categories is a more direct ambition, to look into the sun\u2019s turbulent heart while still fitting the voice into a beat. How do you think about the relationship between language and image? For instance, does one take primacy over the over?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your question is too smart for me to stare at directly. Here\u2019s a couple of famous quotes to look through instead:<\/p>\n

\u201cAn \u2018Image\u2019 is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.\u201d\u2014Pound<\/p>\n

\u201cThe limits of my language mean the limits of my world.\u201d\u2014Wittgenstein<\/p>\n

I think of the poetic image as the limit of language, the edge of what I can say. Not the edge of what can be said\u2014the limit is my own: my world, bounded by my intellect, my emotions, my experiences and imagination. And I think the energy of a good image comes from that tension in the language, that sense, hopefully palpable to the reader, that these words are the most direct way to articulate what I couldn\u2019t say more directly.<\/p>\n

But I also think that getting there involves less profound thinking and more openness to accident, more availability to play. So, in the section of \u201cMicroburst\u201d you quoted, thinking about the limits of sight led to the sun, and the sun led to poor Pluto, which, in the party of our solar system, had recently been declassified as a planet for being eccentric on the outskirts and for breaching the limited plane of all the other planets\u2019 orbits. But if I\u2019m talking about Pluto there, I\u2019m just as much talking about how bad I am at parties. And I\u2019m talking about how speech can be absorbed by music, so I\u2019m also (always) talking about the very question you asked.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This is America and I am pixelated with love.<\/em> 2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

I\u2019m smitten with this line in this poem, which ends in a kind of heartbreak: \u201crun a current through me \/ I won\u2019t light up enough for you to read by.\u201d Love is an important force in your poems\u2014in a general way, it drives a curiosity with the world and objects around you, even as there can be terror and nightmare. Let\u2019s call this affirmation, and let\u2019s call this question 1 of 2 about love. Can you talk about poetry, and specifically image making (an assembly of pixels), as acts of affirmation? What is American about this, and about your poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A pixelated picture seems to me to be like a poetic image that calls attention to its language. A calling attention to the artifice, which makes the artifice more honest. Do you remember how in Much Ado<\/em> Beatrice and Benedick are tricked by their friends so that each thinks the other has professed their love? And how that lie engenders a new truth: They each let down their guard and allow themselves to honestly love the other? I find that deeply affirming. If Plato\u2019s main beef with poets is that poetry is mimetic, I confess\u2014we trade in lies.<\/p>\n

But, to leapfrog across philosophers and centuries, Wittgenstein understood that sometimes we have to lie\u2014or in his case spout nonsense\u2014in order to express a truth, particularly if that truth is at the limit of what can be said: \u201cMy propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)\u201d Maybe what I\u2019m saying is that there\u2019s still a large part of my brain that operates like an analytic philosopher\u2014with a kind of mathematical rigor\u2014and what poetry affirms for me is the beautiful triumph of escaping that. What did T.S. Eliot say? \u201cPoetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.\u201d I love that snark at the end, and if you add rationality to the list of things that poetry sets us free from, then I\u2019m on board.<\/p>\n

As for Americanness, my poems are American because they are unlike each other except for being mine. Because they stumble between the personal and the political, and most of them want very much to believe they belong somewhere. Because they don\u2019t really know what it means to be American, but they\u2019re pretty sure they have at best a partial and tentative claim to it. People from the generation before me see the title of that poem, \u201cContra,\u201d and tend to think, \u201cIran.\u201d People of my generation tend to think, \u201cNintendo!\u201d (They don\u2019t think of Nintendo as Japanese.) That\u2019s American.<\/p>\n