A Quick Interview with Ed Skoog
Ed Skoog’s second book, Rough Day , was released actually *last* year on as-always-great Copper Canyon, and I’ve loved Ed’s stuff for a good while (here’s an older interview I did with him; here’s my take on his first book, Mister Skylight), and I asked him some questions over email earlier this year (February), and now here’s the interview, but, bigger: get his books. Follow him on Twitter, too–I’m not one to stump for social media, but the guy enlarges what feel like the possibilities of that medium.
Is it fair to read Rough Day as a fairly serious departure from Mister Skylight? It feels that way—it feels less built and more murked-through, less arranged and presented and more intuited. Is that remotely accurate? Do you read/feel the difference between the two?
Rough Day‘s not a departure, I don’t think. It’s partly an elaboration of the title sequence, “Mister Skylight.” Formally, certainly, it is. And emotionally, the book is concerned with personal and social rebuilding, while Skylight is emotionally about the texture of loss. It’s reductive to say so, because the poems mean exactly and only what they say, but I can tell you that these are how I see the books, and saw them as I wrote them, because they are what I was feeling and dealing with, emotionally and practically. Of course, the same text will mean different things at different times. I think one often takes years to understand what one’s up to. I think of Yeats’ weird short poem which goes
Although you hide in the ebb and flow
Of the pale tide when the moon has set,
The people of coming days will know
About the casting out of my net,
And how you have leaped times out of mind
Over the little silver cords.
And think that you were hard and unkind,
And blame you with many bitter words.
And which had, without any changes to the text, three titles, published years apart, “Breasal the Fisherman” and then “The Fisherman” and then, finally, just “The Fish.” Sentimentality, which is almost like feeling, is my unfortunate tendency, and I have to work my way towards honesty, sometimes through disruption and plasticity. I’m surprised that you say Rough Day seems more “intuited,” except that there is a sense of discovery in some line progressions, of “learning what next to say.” Perhaps it’s intuited within its form like a blues improvisation. The lines are often detached from the main order, and I perhaps “intuit” my way back into the form.
Tagging up on that: how different was the writing process for each? I know it was New Orleans basement vs walking Washington, DC (to some degree), but was there some intention behind what read as significant changes?
They were different experiences. Mister Skylight is a collection written over time, and Rough Day is, to me, a book-length poem in which each line is aware of the rest of the book, and there are many correspondences across the pages. I think I had something long to say. Something sustained and cascading. My circumstances were very different. What I’m working on now is very different from Rough Day. Some poets write in the same recognizable style from their first line to their last. I’m not worried about finding different registers and modes. I hope an adhesive force makes my work recognizable as part of a whole.
This is as much personal as anything else, given that we’ve both got young ones: how has becoming a father changed your writing?
Has it changed yours? I can’t tell yet. I write (and certainly read) less than before Oscar was born, but I think I’m more focused when I am writing, and I want something different — more sense and meaning. But I don’t think I have any bravely original insights about the matter of children and parents. I have to compress my time, and not get anxious when days/weeks go by without any work. That’s just the choice I made.
I interviewed you before, for the Ploughshares blog, and asked you all sorts of questions about other arts and pleasures, but didn’t much ask about your own tastes in poetry. Is there any aesthetic or group or movement or anything you feel aligned with in your work? I know that’s sort of a silly-ish question, and mildly impossible, but are there some authors whose work you feel your own work shares an affinity with? Again: maybe impossible. It’s fine if it is.
I used to see some affinities, but they don’t mean much to me when I look at what I’m writing. I’ve read the same stuff as everyone else.
This might be another dumb Q, but does social network stuff have anything to do with how you write or figure stuff out in terms of writing? I feel like I can imagine you saying they’re totally different processes, and yet: I follow you on Twitter, and there are times where suddenly there’ll just be a cascade of poetry from you–it’s not *poetic*: the stuff just reads as poetry. And then there’s the podcasting you do with J Robert Lennon (and others). Address this in any/no way as you feel it.
It’s too early for me to say, but I happily participate in the contemporary forms of communication with friends through email, facebook, twitter, instagram and probably a few other systems that I’m forgetting, or have forgotten. With one group of old friends, I use “groupme” which walls off that constant conversation from other forms. Another group I stay in touch with in the comment section of our fantasy baseball forum. These different formats are sorting themselves out, sorting us out, probably in insidious ways, in the same sense that the telephone was invasive and insidious, All mod cons seem to be disruptive, but I don’t have time to mourn traditions–hardly have enough time to mourn actual people. Death on the internet is strange. It’s really very Hermes, the messenger who also takes you to the river. Twitter has been useful as a repository of lines I cut from poems, allow them a life of their own, probably a larger space in other peoples’ minds than the poems they’re cut from will ever make. Fair enough. Podcasting has become and important part of my weekly routine, but I don’t think about it much. It’s a chance to talk to a close friend regularly, and it’s been nice to renew and strengthen that friendship, since we live far apart. I know that some friends listen in, and we have occasional guests, but it’s a small circle of listeners, and another way to stay in touch with people as I retreat into the social shadows of parenting a toddler.
This gets into process stuff you’d maybe rather not even share, which is fine and apologies if it is, but: how long do you work on poems? I know it’s obviously variable, but I want to see if I can circle back to one of the things about Rough Day and how it feels. What I meant by the stuff feeling intuited was that the work felt, poem by poem, much more…feeling its way toward something. Maybe this just has to do with the title-less-ness of the poems, or–as you wrote–that the poems all work together in a book-length way in ways Mister Skylight doesn’t. Maybe this is impossible. All I’m trying to get at: I love your work, and it hits me really hard, and there’s a way that *none* of it offers me anything expected, almost ever. Line by line I’m offered surprise, and usually the suprises are small, but, in accretion, they actually (I’d argue) make a more profound influence than any poem with One Big Surprise to it. There’s a discipline (I feel one, anyway) beneath your work, a dedication to do whatever’s necessary to get to just the right word or idea. God, this feels like just the stupidest question. Maybe just the simple part: how long do poems take? Is there massive revision, etc.? I don’t want it to be that dumb a question, but I might be trying to get into territory that’s ultimately not real explicable or excavatable.
I spent years writing and revising the poems in Mister Skylight and Rough Day, The first drafts of most Rough Day poems were spoken into a recorder as I walked around Washington DC in 2009 and 2010, and then transcribed and revised for a few years. I like to find connections between poems written far apart. I am working poem by poem at present, and trying not to tear them apart too much after they get to a certain place. Last fall I fell into a lucky streak, with several full drafts of acceptable poems a day, scribbling them at an off-track betting parlor in Missoula, Montana where the coffee was free. But for the last four or five months it’s taken ten or twenty days to get a full first draft.
