ROD KESSLER with Tony Leuzzi

The thing is, when I stopped along Route 47 and got out of my car to encounter this tree, I think I did hug it. And I think I did imagine how many of me that it would take to ring it, and that image of me and me and me implanted itself. In this instance, form really was organic.

Rail: I was going to hold off until later on asking about the line drawings dispersed throughout Self-Portrait with Tree, but since you have mentioned them, let’s discuss them now. I’m usually turned off by poetry collections that feature drawings, paintings, or other two-dimensional mediums, but I enjoyed the presence of your drawings here, many of which are lightly-satirical (the “How’s life?/How’s art?” drawing on page 20 and the one in the therapist’s office on page 27 come to mind), though there are others, such as the woman leaning against a wall (page 15) that are more pensive and evocative. In either case, I welcomed the appearance of them on certain pages. Also, I really dug the interactive invitation on the back cover where a rendering of you holds up a paper and wonders: “What if I asked you for a blurb?” What is the story behind the artwork included here? How do you see the drawings interacting with the poems? When, in the process of putting Self-Portrait with Tree together, did you decide to include them?

Kessler: Including the drawings was at the suggestion of the editor at Winter Island Press. For that matter, putting this collection of poems into print was also at the suggestion of the editor at Winter Island Press, Maile Black. Full disclosure: I’m married to her, a fact that explains how she came upon the poems and stories in the first place. But if there was some arm-twisting involved, it wasn’t much.

About the drawings themselves, though: I’ve been at it for as long as I can remember. My mother, whatever her shortcomings as parent and person, was a Pratt Institute-trained painter, a lifelong practitioner in oils and acrylics, so in my world artmaking was a given. (Although she came to repudiate formal art-school schooling, I can still recall her saying, “Try doing more to vary your line.”)

I had no training but developed a facility capturing likenesses by sketching my professors and whatever else caught my eye while sitting—restless—in lectures. My college notebooks are sketchbooks. A drawing I did in a writing seminar as a grad student appears as an illustration in James Hepworth’s tribute to our teacher, Resist Much Obey Little: Remembering Ed Abbey. It caricatured Abbey, hand outstretched, amid the writers in that late-afternoon Tucson classroom.  Alas, once I moved from the student’s seat to the front of the room, my sketching career ended.

There’s more to it that’s pertinent to the matter of writing. We MFA students at the University of Arizona mostly ate, slept, and worked in our writing. It’s what many of us probably knew most about. Even running the track in the evening at Catalina High School, chances are I was jogging alongside Jonathan Penner, one of my workshop teachers, who would say things like, “In a story, Rod, you don’t want to start at the beginning—you want to start with the reader’s heart in your hands.” Yet in workshop, we looked askance at stories whose protagonists were writers. Being so self-referential was taboo, like writing poems about writing poetry.

So, one wanted to have command, if only for writing purposes, of a parallel art. Instead of a would-be writer at their center, my stories sometimes had a would-be cartoonist. And I drew cartoons. Just four days ago I was pruning my too-crowded bookshelves for items to donate to my town’s book swap and came across a duplicate copy of the initial issue of Sonora Review, a magazine still in business 45 years later. Flipping through it I was surprised to see not one but two of my cartoons included, drawings I’d long forgotten about. (The masthead contained another surprise: I was listed as the nonfiction editor, but the issue contained no nonfiction.)

I’ve had some ideas for cartoons. A man on his bent knee holds out a diamond to a young beauty and asks, “Will you be my first wife?”  In another, a fellow boasts to his friend, “I missed my graduations, but I attended all my weddings.” More recently, this—our President announcing his latest revision to the world map, in which “Greenland” has been crossed out and replaced by “Crimea.”

If I had ideas like these every day, I might have been a cartoonist. But they come only one or two a year.

It pleases me that the drawings are included in the book, if only because doing so rescues them from obscurity. Certainly, they also communicate the poet’s vision, if I might be allowed a self-conception so grandiose! At least they share with some of the poetry the occasional whimsy and openness.

The placement of the drawings in the book was out of my hands. Maybe there’s no rhyme or reason to it?  I like to think that the illustrations serve as resting stations, places of pause, palate-clearers for the mind, between poems. And there’s this: maybe the point was to add a few pages, to pad a book still too thin to have its title on the spine.

Rail: One of my favorite poems in the collection is called “Eating the Dead,” which I will now quote in full:

Like many of the best poems I’ve read, this poem is so direct and accessible that almost anyone could enter it and immediately understand its tensions. At the same time, there are so many micro stories within the larger story that animate the poem and give it an impressive breadth. I zoomed in on Dave Edgar and then May Sarton, though any number of the people referred to here had full lives beyond this poem. As a reader, I move down the poem and trace the speaker’s argument, but I also pause in parts to ponder the thumbnail sketches the speaker provides. I don’t have a question, per se. More of a “thank you.” I’m hoping you can discuss this poem in more depth.

Kessler: If I’d written this poem now instead of half a lifetime ago—Ed Abbey died in 1989; May Sarton, 1995—it would be a lot longer. Our relationship with the dead changes as we age, at least mine does. At seventy-five, I’m much more aware that death doesn’t only ever happen to someone else. And more and more I’m at peace with that. The poet John Holmes, one of Anne Sexton’s teachers, wrote a terrific poem on the subject, “The Fear of Dying,” which appeared oddly enough, just as I was born, in 1949. It ran in the Atlantic. He was about the same age –forty-five—as I was writing “Eating the Dead.”

The dead in this poem were my dead, the dead I had known in life. To the world, most were no one special, my grandfather (although he evidently was a good Communist), my little brother (see “Late Delivery”), David Edgar and Martin Etter (my closest friends in high school and college respectively). Peggy was the lovable, sweet kid-sister of a one-time girlfriend, now also felled by cancer.

Abbey and Sarton were, of course, well-known writers. Abbey had been one of my teachers at Arizona, and we grew close enough for him to invite me to call him “Ed” instead of the “Mr. Abbey” he expected of students, even MFA graduate students. In 1982, May Sarton spoke at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1982, the year that I was the Bennett Fellow—the writer in residence. I was asked to escort her.  She took a shine to me and invited me every few months to come up to York, Maine, and have lunch. She saw me as a grandson figure, if there is such a thing. Some years later when we brought her to read at Salem State, her reputation was such that we had to move the reading to the largest room on campus, the main stage auditorium, something never done before nor after. She filled every seat. May Sarton. Now, no one has ever heard of her. Go figure.

“Eating the Dead” hadn’t been published prior to its appearance in this book. It could be that I never sent it off. Was it too personal? Too idiosyncratic? Why should anyone care about Harry, “my Zaida,” or David Edgar, who worked on submarines along the Connecticut shore? But I remember now that a colleague of mine at Salem State, not an English professor but someone in what used to be called the Foreign Languages Department, after hearing it read at one of our annual faculty readings, asked for a copy and then, time after time, would tell me how much the poem meant to her. And that was Kristine Doll, who would go on to publish books of poetry and of translation herself and win both the Pjetër Bogdani Prize for Poetry, awarded by the International Writers Association, and the Homer European Medal of Poetry. Maybe I should have sent it off somewhere?

Rail: Another favorite of mine from your collection, “Doing Without,” is a poem in which the speaker has lost one of his winter gloves. This prompts him to remember as a child, reading a book about a French boy who has lost the Do in his Do Rei Me. The last few lines are:

Here was a puzzle. Where would you have to go
to find his insubstantial do? Suppose
you had to find it. Would you drum the air?
I’d try it gloveless, raw-boned; fingers bare.

You really strike a great balance here between lightly humorous and deeply moving. Anyway, this is one of several poems in Self-Portrait with Tree that involves a boy—and this seems like an important sub-theme in the book. What does “boy” conjure for you and why do you think boys make frequent appearances here?

Kessler: I’m pleased that you enjoyed the humor of the whimsical “Doing Without,” a poem whose very title is a pun. It developed as a model for the creative writing classroom, a piece meant to illustrate “musicality” and also to pose a dynamic between hidden (unstressed) rhyming and the stressed kind. This poem is fun to read aloud, indeed is meant to be. There’s fun, I think, in the placing of the very weak “of” at its line’s end—and it getting something out of it, that rhyme with “glove.” I’ve advised student writers never to end lines with an “of” (or with a “the” or an “a,” and so on), yet here the exception seems to prove the rule.

Is the poem also serious, also “moving”?  I’m not sure, unless it is in underscoring how life inevitably is tied to loss, both the tangible kind (that glove) and the intangible (that insubstantial do).

Rail: Perhaps you aren’t sure, but I find it unambiguously moving. That the adult speaker’s loss of the glove triggers something much deeper, ie: a child’s connection to loss, is significant and foundational, even in the realm of the playful punning you’ve established.

Kessler: There actually was a tangible loss here—a real glove lost during a real winter. I’ve a long history of losing gloves, so keeping a pair for three winters was a feat. I soon found myself collecting stray gloves as I made my way through the world. I actually thumbtacked lost gloves to a campus bulletin board, hoping that their owners could reunite with them. And I started keeping count of the kinds of gloves I was finding. I took photographs and thought of writing an essay. Did you know that the vast majority of lost gloves is right-handed gloves—the dominant-hand glove? With so many orphan gloves in my possession, I took to wearing mismatched or vaguely matched pairs.

But I invented the part about a book about a French boy who lost le dot de son clarinet. Pure fabrication. There’s a popular kids’ song in France with that title, but in that version the French for clarinet is given correctly—clarinette. (And I should have written sa clarinette, not son. As we say in English, “Oops.”)

Had I known that clarinet was feminine, I might have made it a French girl. But boys? My heart goes out to the little kid in “The Deaf Boy,” with those “putty-colored plastic slugs” encircling his ears, but I don’t think that in this collection “boy” serves as thematic through-line. Yes, there’s also the poem “Little Boy,” but that really was the nickname for the A-bomb that melted Hiroshima. The bomb that blasted Nagasaki was Fat Man. “Little Boy” does face “The Deaf Boy” in the book, though, so I can see how the question comes up.

Rail: In your “Preface” to the second printing of Self-Portrait with Tree, you mention your unpublished novel Edelman Unsung. Among the novel’s characters is “a poet—mercurial, sometimes strident, sometimes witty, feminist poet.” A handful of poems from Self-Portrait are authored by this character, your invention. Within the context of the novel, I am guessing these poems illuminate the character and contribute to the overall plot. In what ways do you see the poems independent of the novel? Do they read differently? Are they tonally different, perhaps? Is there a way in which the poems even benefit from their separation from the novel?

Kessler: The hero of my gloriously and stubbornly unpublished novel has two loves in his life, the nineteenth-century British novelist Walter Carling (a fictionalized, thinly disguised Thomas Hardy) and the tantalizing, unpossessable poet Raine Jones. Edelman is a last-minute hire at an undistinguished non-elite college where his Carling seminar is dropped due to low enrollment, leaving him with four sections of Comp. The poet operates as a muse of iconoclasm and non-compliance, and toward the end of the novel, with no help from Edelman, she descends on the campus as its major visiting poet.

It is through her poems that the reader is meant to know her fire and vitality—her defiance.  Writing her poems was a challenge. I was helped and encouraged in the process by my one-time grad school pal, the poet Tony Hoagland, under whom I worked briefly at the Vermont Studio Center.  He’s dead now and won’t mind my telling stories on him. He certainly thought that Raine Jones’s poems could stand on their own and suggested that I submit them for publication under her name. And so, I did. Both “Word Problem” and “Soapbox” originally appeared in print under her name.

“Her” poems tonally are different from my other poems—so much so that I won’t claim them as mine à la “I am a multitude, I contain many.” No, they are persona poems, but in the sense that it’s the poet who’s the persona. Many poems are autobiographical, expressing the writer’s soul and angst and all that. But they needn’t be. Maybe it’s a good challenge. Imagine being someone very different from yourself and write her (his, their) poems.

Alas, the inclusion of these poems possibly muddies the unity of my book.

Rail: Rod, you’ve been so generous with your time and responses this week. I really appreciate you and your work. I’m wondering what, if any, writing projects are on the horizon for you. Do you see yourself writing more fiction? More poems? 

Kessler: Maybe it’s only an illusion that the sands of the hourglass pour out most quickly at the end, but so it seems with aging: never before have the days raced by so quickly. Never before has the hour flashed by so fast. What used to last sixty minutes seems now no more than forty. If there’s a finish line up ahead, the distance to it is quickly narrowing. So, it’s with urgency that I look ahead, even as I also yearn to go at my own slow pace—a pace I need to adopt just to be at peace, much less to be productive.

Given a diminishing future, where does writing fit in? It must mean something that I still keep the 600 pages of my unpublished novel in a box on the floor beside my bed, never having gotten around to moving it to the basement. Shall I give it a final look-over and revision? It wasn’t intended as an historical novel, yet its characters live in a now foreign-seeming world without laptops, without the Internet, without cell phones. Must I go to the grave leaving it all behind in a cardboard box?

As for new work, whether poetry or prose, I’m not sanguine, but who knows what the Muse has in store for me? Well, here’s what I really suspect: some time ago, maybe fifteen years ago, maybe twenty, maybe more, the Muse did appear to me. She sat me down and said, “Kessler, I’m going to give you a choice. You can suffer in life and live as a solitary, lonely, unfulfilled, and emotionally hungry—yet also live deeply self-contained in your art, and be endlessly prolific, endlessly creative. Or, you can have a life of love and fulfillment, enjoying the bliss of the marital bed, having your lifelong hunger satiated—but at the cost of your writing. You’ll lose the need, the urge, the push on the inside that propels writers to write. You’ll go silent.

The Muse is tricky. She made me choose, and I must have chosen, and then she drew a veil of amnesia over our encounter. I have no recollection of it happening. It’s just a fantasy, right? Some kind of metaphor? Things like that don’t happen? And yet I have at least one writing pal, a miserable fellow, unrooted in the world of others, not in great health, who publishes book after book. The Muse met up with him too around the same time. How did he choose?

All the same, I remain a citizen in the world of writing. Not one or two but a handful of poets have recently trusted me with their collections-in-progress, seeking comments and advice, and these projects have all been published. I’m also invited to supply blurbs for projects in the pipeline (and it’s a point of honor that I read the manuscript first). I oversaw the first go-round of Soundings East’s annual Claire Keyes poetry competition and am now coordinating White Mice: The International Lawrence Durrell Society Poetry Contest.

And I do still send off my work for publication, if in a modest way. Now and then I write op-eds for the opinion page of my town’s newspaper (circulation 7,200), but here it’s not the Muse pushing me into print but our nation’s sorry political state. Fingers to the keyboard, I’m doing what I can.