12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Prufer

Kevin Prufer's newest poetry collection is The Fear (Copper Canyon Press in 2023). Hisnew novel,  Sleepaway is out in 2024 from Acre Books. He is also the author of several other books ofpoetry, including  The Art of Fiction (2021), How He Loved Them (2018), Churches  (2014), In a Beautiful Country  (2011),and National Anthem  (2008),all from Four Way Books.

He's edited several volumes of poetry, including NewEuropean Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (MilkweedEditions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and IntoEnglish: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (GraywolfPress, 2017; w/ Martha Collins).  

With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Pruferdirects the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the workof great but little known authors to new generations of readers through theannual republication of a large body of each author's work, printed alongsideessays, photographs, and ephemera.  

 

Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at theUniversity of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University.

Among Prufer's awards and honors are manyPushcart prizes and Best American Poetry selections,numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from theNational Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation.  His poetrycollection How He Loved Them waslong-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award forthe best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press.

Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Kevin Pruferstudied at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA) and WashingtonUniversity (MFA).

1 - How did your firstbook change your life?

My first book came outwhen I was still in my mid-20s.  It wasaccepted for publication before I defended it as an MFA thesis. I was certainlynot ready to have a book out and it did not do well in the world.  It got one entirely negative (even nasty)review in a major literary quarterly, and then it vanished. Still, I had a bookout from a reputable publisher, so I felt pretty good about it at the time.

2 - How did you come topoetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I always likedpoetry.  I had to memorize it at my toneyboarding school and I came to love the cadences of Eliot and Frost andDickinson, even though I didn’t necessarily understand the poems all thatcompletely.  In college, at WesleyanUniversity, I took no poetry classes, but I wrote poems and edited theundergraduate literary magazine.  Oneday, I sent a single poem out to a magazine I’d found on the shelf of a localbookstore and—in retrospect, amazingly—they took it.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, I becamecommitted to poetry in a lifelong sort of way.

3 - How long does it taketo start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially comequickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to theirfinal shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I’m pretty fast.  I get an idea and run with it as far as Ican.  More often than not, though, I endup dropping it and going with something else, running with that, instead, andusually dropping it.  But for individualpieces that do make it into books: the first drafting process is fast.  Then I revise a lot.  I don’t take notes.  I do read a lot, though. 

4 - Where does a poem orwork of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces thatend up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?

I’m usually not working ona book—not when I’m writing poems.  Ijust get to a point where a book seems inevitable.  It is not a fraught process for me.  I gather the poems into a manuscript.  I think about how they are in conversationwith each other and I try to make that conversation interesting.  That is all. The difficult part is always writing the poems. My novel, Sleepaway,however, was always going to be a book.

5 - Are public readingspart of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer whoenjoys doing readings?

I am ambivalent aboutreadings.  I do a lot of them and I’vehad a lot of practice.  Because of this,I know how to read poems out loud.  (Ittakes practice, truly. And sometimes coaching from more experienced friends.) ButI often leave readings exhausted and nervous and wanting, more than anything, adrink or three.  Alone.  But that’s just my own nonsense.   I think a poetry reading is a good way toencounter poems which are (or ought to be) experiences of both music andlanguage.   These days, I’m reading frommy novel.  I’m still learning how to dothat, though.  It requires a slightlydifferent set of skills.

6 - Do you have any theoreticalconcerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answerwith your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m not sure what thecurrent questions are and, if I were sure, I would probably try to avoidthem.  I am interested in the way timepasses and in the ways writers control the passage of time.  I’m also interested in history, the wayhistory lives inside our senses of who we are and inside our language.  And I’m interested in the inevitability ofdecline—social, historical, personal, mortal—and how that inevitability shapesour art and selves.  I guess these areeternal questions.

7 – What do you see thecurrent role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? Whatdo you think the role of the writer should be?

I used to admire theVictorian idea of a writer as someone who thinks carefully about ethics andvalues and communicates those careful thoughts to readers who need to hearthem.  Now I think that the role ofwriters is to participate in a larger, multidimensional conversation ofliterature and art.  All of us, writers,artists, or not, get to listen in on that conversation, which is vast,polyvalent, and multiply simultaneous, and, in doing so, learn about who wehave been, who we are, and who we might become.

8 - Do you find theprocess of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Depends very much on theeditor.  I’ve had many, most of themquite good.  My current editors, atCopper Canyon Press and Acre Books, are extraordinarily good.  And when I get good editorial advice about mywriting, it is never difficult to take it. It usually feels, instead, essential and inspiring.

9 - What is the best pieceof advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

For writers?  It is this: “If you are chicken-shit all by yourself in front of your own computerwhile you are writing a poem or a story or an essay … then when aren’t youchicken-shit?”  I know that’s more of aquestion than a piece of advice, but it was given to me by a writer I admirewhen I was rewriting the same kind of poem over and over again.  I needed to be a little bit braver and trythings I was uncomfortable with – there, in front of my computer, alone, with aglass of wine, at night.

10 - How easy has it beenfor you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as theappeal?

It has been easy.  I love both genres and am curious about thetools available to me in each.  They aredifferent, certainly.  The tool of thepoetic line is formidable and many-bladed and it is hard, sometimes, to workwithout it.  But I’ve found that theparagraph has its own excitement and velocity.

11 - What kind of writingroutine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day(for you) begin?

I write late at nightonly. With a glass of wine and music.

12 - When your writinggets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)inspiration?

I read books.  Lots of them. I am always reading a book or two. But, unlike most my friends who aren’t writers, I read like awriter.  That is, I ask, “why did theauthor choose to do it this way? Why not that way?  What’s governing the odd choice of tense here?  Or the shift in point of view?”   Those kinds of questions are important to mebecause they give me ideas for my own writing (and help me understand otherwriters’ choices).  I can see how theymight interfere with my enjoyment of some books, though.

13 - What fragrancereminds you of home?

4711.  A cologne from Cologne.

14 - David W. McFaddenonce said that books come from books, but are there any other forms thatinfluence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Mostly books, yes.  I always have music playing while I write, soin a vague way, music.  And, of course,my own experience as a living person. That’s probably the biggest thing. Still, I can’t overestimate the writing of other people as formative.

15 - What other writers orwritings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

In prose, Emily St. JohnMandell’s Station Eleven.  And allof Willa Cather.  And everything by Henry James.  Flannery O’Connor.  And Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands.  In poetry, Keats.  Eliot. Delmore Schwartz.  Catullus.  Russell Atkins.  Laura Jensen.   I could go on and on. Truly, I am a uselessmachine that reads.  Those are a few, offthe top of my head.

16 - What would you liketo do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to finish thenovel I am writing now.  And I would loveto go to Sicily, to visit the Classical and pre-Classical sites there, sitesI’ve read all about for years.  I wouldalso like to be able to go back in time. I’d travel way back to the 4th or 3rd centuries inWestern Europe—maybe Ravenna or Trier—and try to understand what it was like tobe alive then. 

17 - If you could pick anyother occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do youthink you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I worked in the news for awhile, for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. But I didn’t like it much.  I wasgoing to teach high school and then I was going to get a PhD in comparativeliteratures (German, French, English).  I’mglad I didn’t do any of those.  I’m veryhappy being a writer and also working with talented younger writers as theylearn who they are and how to write through that.

18 - What made you write,as opposed to doing something else?

It was inevitable.  I’ve always written.   There wasn’t something else.  I remember showing my third grade teacher mystory about a penguin.  “I didn’t copythis,” I told her. “I wrote it myself.” I didn’t say this because I was insecure.  I said it because I knew my story was sogreat that she would think a professional, famous writer had written it if Ididn’t inform her otherwise.  Probably awriter who had won many major prizes.

19 - What was the lastgreat book you read? What was the last great film?

Black Earth by Timothy Snyder was the last truly great book I’ve read.  It terrified me.  Strangely, the last great film I’ve seen wason the same subject. Zone of Interest.

20 - What are youcurrently working on?

I’m editing a book ofpoems by authors you’ve never heard of (but should have heard of) for WesleyanUniversity Press.  I imagine it will bean alternate (or antidote) to the familiar Norton anthologies.  I’m doing this with a couple friends, Martin Rock and Adrienne Perry, both excellent editors and writers.  And I’m writing another novel.  And I’ve got a new book of poems mostly done,too.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;