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Unread 10-04-2009, 07:17 PM
Jehanne Dubrow Jehanne Dubrow is offline
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Default Interview with Quincy Lehr

Quincy’s Demographic Information:
Educational background: B.A., History, University of Texas at Austin
M.A. M.Phil., Ph.D., History, Columbia University
Home town: Norman, Oklahoma
City of residence: Brooklyn, NY
Profession: Historian
Religious background: Lutheran (ELCA)
Ethnic background: Germano-British
Occupations of parents: organic chemist (father); children’s librarian (mother)
Some key influences at various points: T. S. Eliot, Byron, Derek Mahon, Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, H.D., both Brownings, Thomas Hardy, Claude McKay, Melvin Tolson, Derek Walcott, Louis MacNeice, Ray Pospisil, W. H. Auden, Rick Mullin, Baudelaire, Lord Rochester, Louis Aragon, Edmund Spenser, R. Nemo Hill, Lemmy of Motorhead, Austin Clarke, Larkin, John Berryman, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, P. B. Shelley, Sid Vicious, Andre Breton, Leon Trotsky
Age at time of first publication in a reputable journal: 28
Age at time of first collection: 30 (chapbook), 32 (full-length)

I first met Quincy in person at the West Chester Poetry Conference in the summer of 2008. But I feel as if I’ve known him much longer than that, having become a fan of his words years ago. Both on the page and on the computer screen—through his very active and vocal participation in the Eratosphere community—Quincy demonstrates a willingness to say The Difficult and Necessary Thing. This is a quality I look for not only in my friends but also in the poets I choose to read.

As a result of Quincy’s studies as a historian, his work exhibits a scrupulous historicity, a sharp understanding of political movements and the movements of people. And having spent a number of years overseas, in Ireland, Quincy writes poems that push past the boundaries of the United States; he never speaks as a wide-eyed tourist in strange or “foreign” cultures but as a traveler, an explorer simultaneously able to critique and also to appreciate the experience of being an American. This global perspective seems unusual in a poet of any age (much less one who’s not yet reached his mid-thirties).

Quincy is the author of the poetry collection, Across the Grid of Streets (Seven Towers 2008), as well as two chapbooks, William Montgomery's Guide to New York City (Seven Towers 2008) and William Montgomery (Modern Metrics 2006). He has recently completed a book-length poetic sequence, Heimat, a project that intertwines familial history with national history in surprising, musical ways; although the book participates in a conversation with traditional epic, the text also demonstrates that serial poetics remains a viable, rewarding, and unquestionably modern endeavor, even in the 21st century.

Quincy’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Measure, Umbrella, The HyperTexts, and Iambs & Trochees. Quincy also serves as the Associate Editor of The Raintown Review, a literary journal that has published some of the most important formalists working today, including Annie Finch, Molly Peacock, X.J. Kennedy, and A.E. Stallings. Given his energy, ambition, and commitment to literature, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years, Quincy is running his own poetry empire, complete with press, journal, and reading series.
Q&A

JD: Quincy, reading Across the grid of streets, I was struck by the ways in which your poems seem utterly American at times (for instance, “Alternative Rock Song,” which really sounds like the generation of music that we both grew up in). But then, at other moments, your work shows the influence of your years overseas. When I was studying your long poem, “Time Zones,” I kept hearing echoes of Larkin in the text, his restraint, his easy, matter-of-fact handling of the meter, his effortless movement between high and low diction. Even when Pizza Hut, Cheech and Chong, and Oklahoma appear in “Time Zones,” the poem still sounds as if it belongs to several cultures at once. When you’re writing, do you feel a pull between your American life and the self you were when you lived abroad in Ireland? In terms of tone, imagery, and subject matter, how do you find balance between those two points of view? Is balance even possible?

QRL: It's interesting that you should alight on "Time Zones" as the mid-Atlantic poem, as it was the first of the long ones I wrote entirely in Ireland. ("The Joke" straddled the Atlantic, being conceived and begun in New York and completed months later in Dublin.)

But to answer your main question, yes, my time in Ireland had a huge influence on me as a poet. It's hardly surprising, and much of the reason we want to live abroad, I should hope, is to be influenced by people whose backgrounds differ from ours. In the first place, while most Irish poets write mainly free verse nowadays, choosing the rhyme-and-meter route wasn't political the way it is here in the U.S., which meant that, on that side of the Atlantic, I was submitting to and reading the same journals as everyone else. I'd also say that Ireland (and specifically reading the likes of the later Mahon, David Wheatley, Justin Quinn, etc.) loosened me up a bit formally.

I don't know if I've ever felt tension between my American background, time abroad, and the influence of authors who are frequently not American. It's more as if they're overlays, alternate, slightly different vocabularies one can draw on if the need arises. In my case, this goes back to my adolescence as a faculty brat in Norman, Oklahoma. I had, in my natural state, a fairly introspective, quiet disposition. I was intellectually curious and generally suspicious of authority—in a jockocracy-dominated high school in a state where the shadow of fundamentalist Christianity falls pretty heavily. Getting interested in the wider world was almost like reaching for a life line, if that isn't too precious of me.

What I mean is this—in various parts of New York City, you can lead a pretty full life in a fairly discrete number of places. One has the museums, gigantic book stores, multiple major research libraries, etc. One can wander into the KGB Bar on a Monday night and hear Paul Muldoon do a reading. And there's a danger of parochialism in that. I imagine London and Paris can be the same way.

One doesn't have that luxury growing up in Norman, Oklahoma. It's a university town, and I still have a fondness for the OU library, so one can get a good sense of what's "out there," but one has to be keenly aware that most of what one finds interesting is going on elsewhere, and that, to really see it, one has to leave, at least for a while. (And just to note—I have no plans of returning to Oklahoma on a permanent basis.) The upshot of this is that my basic movement intellectually has always been an outward one. I'd still self-identify, primarily, as an Oklahoman (rather than a New Yorker or a "citizen of the world" or something of that ilk), but as an Oklahoman in exile who has, naturally, picked up on some of the rhythms of the places he has lived since. But I've never felt as if I've written outside my own vocabulary, as it were.

One final point about the influence of Ireland on me as a poet. There are roughly 4.4 million people in the Free State, which means that on the one hand, everyone does get to know everyone to at least a certain degree. On the other hand, a population that small is only going to produce a certain amount of anything. And Irish poets—certainly the better among them—were keenly aware of what goes on not only in British and American poetry, but a whole range of continental European poetry, as well as, in many cases, poetries that lie further afield than that. Again, one doesn't have the luxury of relying solely on one's own heritage, impressive in many ways as it may be.

JD: Your answer, with its analysis of the Irish and American poetry scenes, reminds me that you are a trained historian, used to thinking globally about the “big picture.” You didn’t take the familiar route of the creative writing MFA but instead have focused on the study of history throughout your academic career. I’ve often thought that some of the most interesting poets are those whose day jobs keep them well outside of the PoBiz, for instance as doctors, insurance agents, lawyers. How does your training as a historian show itself in your poetry? How does personal and public history intersect in your writing?

QRL: In the first place, I suppose that my background as a historian meant that I have a significant intellectual interest that is not, per se, literary. Of course, I have scads of those, but the poetry sprang from a mind that had already pursued a path that emphasized focusing on primary sources, keeping track of where your ideas were coming from, and having a sense of where your work fit in with what came before in your area.

The influence has not, perhaps been an obvious one, as I have yet to do something like David Mason's Ludlow, say, and even "Heimat," which draws on history more fully than any other poem in my body of work thus far, is hardly a straightforward narrative. I think my historian's background tends to operate more subtly.

First off, I find it really difficult (and rather distasteful) to think of the poem as an entity closed off from society as a whole or somehow existing transhistorically. A given poem, even if it remains interesting to us now, is nevertheless an artifact of its own time and the particular, socially constructed obsessions of its author, whether we as readers are especially conscious of it or not. My own disquiet with the tendency toward domestication, decorousness, and, frankly, dullness in so much American poetry dovetail with more general problems I tend to have with American society. We tend to be rather disconnected from the big events in our culture—whether present-day or in our past, to the point that we do not play a significant role in shaping it. Politically, I'd rather have one good anti-war dock strike than a thousand poetry anthologies against the war, but I cannot help but think that were our time less politically quiescent, we'd have more interesting poetry.

And for all of Ron Silliman's railing against the ostensible "School of Quietude," I've never quite clocked how lang-po is a significant political intervention in anything, any more than the general po-mo wank that has caused so much damage in the liberal arts more generally. Even in cases of poets such as Joshua Clover (who's hardly lang-po, but roughly that way in the American poetry archipelago), who do explicitly subscribe to a leftist agenda, there's a certain degree of cynicism that I find disturbing. I'm highly pessimistic myself, including about the ability of the organized left as it exists now to put its case to the American working class (yes, I'm still one of those), but it's a matter of great sorrow for me, as I still keep the faith.

There's another aspect to your question, though, which is institutional in nature. When I got serious about the poetry toward the end of my graduate school years at the age of twenty-seven, I'd read a great deal of the stuff. But I hadn't a clue what was fashionable or "publishable" or any of the rest. I heard rumors about there being a journal called The Formalist, and I'd pick up copies of Poetry at Labyrinth Books sometimes, but I really didn't know, more than vaguely, who was allied with whom and who might like a certain kind of work, or really, how any of it was done. And I didn't really know anyone in the Biz. I was writing up a storm and quite impressed with my conviction, if I may say so myself, but I knew that I needed to figure out how the system worked to get the stuff in front of people.

So, after perhaps six or seven months of churning out the poems, which were starting to get less terrible (a few were even publishable), I made a point of self-educating myself about the po-biz—and I did so in the craziest way possible. I went to the periodicals room at Columbia and started reading (or at least skimming) the current issue of every journal in it that took poetry... in alphabetical order. I'm sure there are less time-consuming ways to get the lay of the land, but it was rather thorough.

I also checked the contributors’' notes and clocked that very few people didn't have an MFA. Oh dear. I'd turned twenty-eight and had been in school almost continuously since kindergarten and was getting to where the notion of pursuing another degree filled me with a unique dread. Even still, I was, on my own hook, crashing through the canonical stuff I'd missed in my more casual reading of previous years, not to mention such critical literature as I could find that wasn't migraine-inducing. But it was all interesting, even the stuff that I couldn't "use" in an immediate sense.

There is an advantage, too, in approaching the po-biz from the outside looking in. Yes, one can get a bit bent out of shape at the lack of institutional support, the "who the fuck are you, and why haven't I heard of you?" factor. But it can make one a lot more bloody-minded at times. One not only has the freedom to do what one wants without professional pressure, but as the system is not geared toward the non-MFA, it can make one pretty tenacious. Without discounting the real help I've received over the years ("I'd like to thank my parents, and Jesus..."), I largely had to make my own way with a body of work that I wasn't sure slotted particularly easily into the prepared niches—not that I had any particular interest in altering anything to do so.

JD: In Heimat, which I’ve just had a chance to read for the first time, one of the poem’s refrains is “everything falls apart.” Although the poem travels enormous distances and across times, this phrase (despite its acknowledgment of the mutability and fragility of things) serves as a form of connective tissue in the text, tying together what you refer to as “so many pictures—none quite true.” Pentameter and often rhyme create a very cohesive vision in what might certainly be called a contemporary epic. Even when you’re not working on such a grand scale as Heimat, how do you understand the interplay between “everything falls apart” and the constraints of form? Do rhyme and meter serve as a counterbalance to “everything falls apart?” As an expression of that fragility and destruction? As a way of forestalling it?

QRL: Rhyme and meter, are, of course, constructions aimed at getting additional resonances out of words, and that's how I tend to view it, rather than making some grand statement about the order (or lack thereof) in the universe. In Heimat, I strangely found that the more straightforwardly narrative sections fell more naturally into free verse, whereas some of the more gonzoid sections (e.g. the bulk of the Caesar/Asterix/Vercingetorix section) needed the rhyme and meter to bring out some of the juxtapositions.

There has been a strain in criticism for some time, when it comes to metrical verse—on both the pro- and con- sides—that I find highly unfortunate, which states either (if one is poo-pooing rhyme and meter) that our world is just too damn chaotic for verse to be so ordered, or (from certain quarters on the pro-side) that rhyme and meter are part of the arsenal in the kulturkampf against postmodernism and moral relativism and all the rest. Even leaving aside the reactionary implications of the latter argument, it underestimates the ability of rhyme, meter, and all the rest to be subversive, perhaps because they have such a long tradition and weight of expectation behind them.

As you know, the decision of what tricks to use—and this goes for free verse as much as metrical verse—are complex and, in my case, at least, largely a question of getting the groove right. I use a musical metaphor because I tend to think of meter as time signature. (With pentameter being a sort of "common time.") Indeed, with Heimat, I was, in structure, trying to think symphonically, and I probably had certain late Romantic symphonies in mind more than any specifically literary models when writing it. Much of the revision, moreover, was aimed at drawing out some of the main themes—let's get a tet section about halfway through foreshadowing the "no way out" stuff at the end; let's add a stanza with the "here be groovy shapes, man" motif in the Hamilton section to more closely link him to Caesar, as I see the two of them as linked. On the other hand, I went free-verse (to a large extent) with both Willich and Henry Adams, as they represent somewhat contrasting elements in nineteenth-century America that met in both the abolitionist movement and, in a sense, in my own Germano-WASP, leftist, Ivy League background. (And I was, in a very loose way, riffing on some of the early Cantos of Ezra Pound in the free verse sections, which also affected a few prosodic decisions.)

In a poem like "The Joke" in Across the Grid of Streets, on the other hand, the progressive disintegration of the formal bits into rather manic free verse was quite deliberate, where the poem's quest for a particular sort of meaning collapses under its own weight, and phrases from earlier parts of the poem return in increasingly fractured form. (At least that's what I was aiming for.) But formal questions, for me, at least, are best handled on a poem-by-poem basis.

JD: Quincy, one of the dominant themes that seems to have emerged from your answers is the notion that free verse is an important and necessary tool, one which the formalist poet should be willing to use when a poem demands it. I certainly share this point of view. Yet, it doesn’t seem like this easy movement between metrical verse and vers libre is particularly common in the generation of formalist poets that preceded ours. Is this a generational shift? If you could use your gift of poetic prophesy, where would you say American formal poetry will be in twenty years? Or, perhaps more importantly, what would like American formal poetry to be doing in twenty years? Where do you see yourself in that picture (and feel free to be immodest!)?

QRL: To ignore poetry in free verse is to ignore the bulk of poetry in the twentieth century in the English language, including most of the good stuff, and I seriously doubt that one can survive on a diet of New Formalism alone. Indeed, that animal seems increasingly rangy and hard to digest. Even if one writes overwhelmingly in meter, there is too much to be appreciated in free verse to simply dismiss it in toto. And no "formalist" critics whom I would take remotely seriously do so.

As for where it's all going, Antonin Artaud said it better than I could decades ago: "It's just another fucking bill to pay." We're over a quarter-century into most of the significant "movements" currently spread around American poetry—and I do not make an exception for New Formalism. It's a series of poses, a method of product placement, a way to get your name on the back cover of a journal. And it's as insipid as ever.

Now, one can hope that something will come along and blow the fucker wide open for a few years, and a few poets who don't quite fit the mold will somehow squeeze through. R. Nemo Hill and I founded Modern Metrics to try to find and promote a few of those authors, and I took the associate editor job at The Raintown Review to try to keep them from utterly slipping through the cracks. But really, with a few exceptions (yourself certainly included), I'm not terribly impressed with those of our generation who seem to get the big grants and the massive kudos. Yes, the ducks are in the row, but ducks bore the hell out of me. Where's the aesthetic ambition? The willingness to screw up royally in the search for that poem that does what no poem has ever done before?

I suspect that formal poetry will, by and large, where younger poets are concerned, remain the preserve of the rather poised and decorous, with a few snarling types like me showing up to the conferences to consume as much free wine as is humanly possible and snarl at their confections. New Formalism will hang on as an academic tendency for some time, I suspect, as will the associated journals, but its middlebrow affectations and suburban complacencies are largely spent aesthetically.

I do see hints of something more interesting to come, with the larger project, the less rigidly logical structure, and the messier ending coming to the fore, but it has yet to find a real locus. There are some discrete points of gathering, but it's ultimately going to demand new magazines, new publishers, new events. And our generation has been fairly dilatory with that stuff. Either we grow a pair (and that includes the girls!) right quick, or it's going to be pure mellifluous muck in twenty years.

Where do I fit in? Well, where the purveyors of mellifluous muck are concerned, I'll be doing my utmost to mess up what they consider to be good poetry. But mostly, I'll be trying to write that definitive Quincy R. Lehr poem, the one that says everything I ever wanted to say with the maximum power I can muster. Same as always. And I'll probably never quite succeed, but the attempts, at the risk of sounding immodest, should be worth a look and not without their rewards. As for grants and kudos and all the rest, the powers-that-be will take notice, or they will be made to take notice. It can go the easy way or the hard way. Their choice.
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Unread 10-04-2009, 08:17 PM
Janet Kenny Janet Kenny is offline
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Golly I enjoyed reading that discussion. I found myself cheering all the way through.
Quincy it's your sense of freedom that I most admire. You are hardly aware of boundaries and that opens up your work in a way that, for me, sets it apart from any possible stereotype.
Because I worked in classical music, where everyone thinks like that, I often felt repressed and confined in poetry forums. In fact I no longer write free verse and I used to write a great deal of it. I love what you said about mixing it and using it as a voice when the occasion demands.

I have read Heimat and I'm not at all amazed to read that you thought symphonically. I think many novelists do the same. Heimat has the complexity of references and the coherence that is important in extended orchestral writing. Don't ever let fashion get you. Of course I am confident that you never will.
It's hard to think of a question because you have already answered mine.

Thank you Jehanne for being such a skilful questioner.
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Unread 10-04-2009, 09:01 PM
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Quincy Lehr Quincy Lehr is offline
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Janet--

Thanks for the note. As for fashion, I have never, in my life, been fashionable. Well, once, for a brief moment, but I switched fashions as a result.

And Jehanne asked some very good questions indeed, and I hope I did justice to them.

Quincy
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Unread 10-04-2009, 09:40 PM
Jehanne Dubrow Jehanne Dubrow is offline
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Quincy, interesting questions are easy with such great work to discuss.
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Unread 10-04-2009, 10:14 PM
David Rosenthal David Rosenthal is offline
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Quincy,

There is much to like in that interview. I like your resistance to pronouncements about the implications of form, because for me writing in meter and rhyme has always been an irresistible compulsion, without much forethought, and which at times I have resented, despised, tried to overcome. But I am politically and philosophically very far from what many critics -- both pro- and con- -- associate with formal writing.

I also admire your sense of ambition. I find it both inspiring and dispiriting -- the latter because I continue, despite brief fits of mad proclamations, to be drawn as a poet and a reader to little lyrics. This brings me to my first question, perhaps an obvious one:

What do you go through to write a huge number like Heimat? I mean that question to include: What is the process? How does the process differ from composing shorter pieces, if it does? Do you stop all other production when you are tackling a long piece? Is it a chaotic trance-dream, a disciplined story-boarded routine, something else, a combination?

This might apply just to Heimat since that is one I know pretty well from spending some time with it, but I suspect it relates to other long poems as well (perhaps even shorter pieces). Heimat obviously dealt with a bunch of "big ideas," but it also struck me as a pretty personal poem. Granted that some of the "big ideas" in that particular poem deal with issues of personal and familial identity and history, I still want to ask this: Are you more likely to start from a "big idea" -- historical, cultural, philosophical, etc. -- and find personal connections to it, or from personal sentiments, family history, etc. and draw out the "big idea" implications? Or do these strands present themselves intertwined from the start?

Finally, I am seven years older than you and Jehanne. But I feel "generationally" close to you and other people and poets your age, and certainly closer to you than to people and poets seven years older than me. Do you feel closer to those seven years younger than you or those seven years older? What does the historian in you say about this? What does the poet in you say about this?

Sorry for the barrage. Answer what you will.

Best as always,

David R.
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Unread 10-04-2009, 11:20 PM
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Quincy Lehr Quincy Lehr is offline
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Good question, Dave.

Writing a long poem (by which I mean more than about five pages) is a fairly different process than writing a shorter piece. My short poems probably emerge like most people's. That is, I have an idea, and I write it down. Indeed, frequently, I'll have a series of poems on similar ideas, and will, over time, discard the also-rans in favor of the few (or one) that really seem(s) to nail the idea the best. (I should note, by the way, that AtGoS is a seventeen-poem collection, but is a full-lengther.)

Long poems work differently. They tend to have long gestation periods, in the first place. ("Time Zones" in the book is the exception; I came up with the idea in late November 2006, wrote the first canto in between classes over two days, and pretty much knew where it was going from the moment of inspiration.) In the case of Heimat, in the spring of 2007 while living in Dublin, I came up with the idea of writing a poem about America. Before living abroad, I'd not been that conscious of my Americanness. One typically isn't when living in one's homeland. But teaching U.S. history in a different country, at times having to explain things that struck me as perfectly obvious, it became foregrounded enough in my consciousness that it became poetically relevant, and entwined with the very different republican history of my country of residence.

I started work on a long poem that would trace the decline of the American Republic, ending in my period of research specialization, the World War I era. I got about twenty pages in, and it collapsed under its own weight. But I'd managed to get a fair number of historical figures going, and about seven pages of Heimat are salvaged from that poem (though heavily edited since). The problem, though, was that there just wasn't enough variation. We get Willich and the Red '48ers. We get Henry Adams. We get Thaddeus Stevens. It was too much of a piece, and the prosody was a bit Pound-derivative.

So, the idea went on the backburner. Fast-forward to the summer of 2008. I knew I would soon return to the U.S., and I started thinking analogously about my father's side of the family immigrating to the United States, which, given the experience of German-Americans in World War I, resonated with the previous, aborted poem. But still... I just couldn't write it. Something was missing. It just didn't have enough going on.

So I moved back to New York, and I wrote some short stuff and a couple of longer ones, and the poem I knew would be called "Heimat" continued to gestate. I knew that it would be a combination of metrical and free verse and would be a standalone poem, and that it would prosodically build on things I'd done in previous long poems, but would be a bit tighter thematically. More of a symphony and less of a collage.

Then, in early 2009, Rick Mullin wrote a book-length poem called "Huncke," in my mind the best poem written by an American in the last twenty years. It wasn't that similar to my "Heimat," which I had yet to... erm... write, being situated in Bohemia and a very different pop-and-high-culture sensibility to my own, as well as being in ottava rima and taking certain cues from Byron, where Pound, Zukofsky, and Eliot were closer to my conception. But the way that Rick mixed and matched the disparate elements of his poem appealed to me greatly, and I thought, "I have to try some of that."

Strangely, I finally wrote Heimat without initially meaning to. I was nearing the end of a school year and hadn't really written that much since March. But, in May, for reasons that needn't detain us, I was in a state of great emotional excitation and was jotting down fragments that seemed to point to a larger picture. Eventually, the day after I handed in my final grades, I was absolutely frantic. I had maybe slept three hours the previous night, and as I walked through Greenwich Village on a Friday evening, I realized I hadn't eaten since Wednesday. I was in quite a state.

And I started writing in a yellow legal note pad. I came up with a notion that I was going to do something that I rather pretentiously called "The Project." Everything I would write between then and the end of June, I think, was slated for "The Project." It would go into it or it would be deleted, and I'd figure out some way to link up all the stuff I'd written at the end.

It didn't work out that way. I went home and, in a flurry of typing out what I'd written, plus adding another eight pages, or so, I was writing "Heimat," and while I didn't know every little nook and cranny of it, I knew roughly how long it was going to be, what its emotional core was, and roughly how it would end.

I drafted it in under three weeks. (It's the advantage of being an academic--you can transform into an obsessive hermit for periods over the summer.) My smoking went up to two packs a day for a time, and I think I lost about ten pounds of weight as I routinely forgot meals while churning out lines and weed-whacking them back on a screen partially obscured by cigarette smoke. When the first draft was done, I looked and felt terrible, but I had a poem that looked roughly like the current version.

The point of this long anecdote is that some ideas, for me, at least, have layers of inspiration, and it's not so much that I say, "I want to write a poem about X, Y, and Z," but rather that the strata accumulate until a certain density is reached. At which point I generally have a reasonably good idea of where I'm going at the outset, and I generally get there quickly, albeit at a certain cost to my health at times.

Does that answer your question?

(Jehanne--aw shucks. [Blushes furiously.])

Quincy

Last edited by Quincy Lehr; 10-09-2009 at 11:34 PM.
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Unread 10-04-2009, 11:20 PM
Peter Coghill Peter Coghill is offline
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Hi Quincy, you move from free verse to formal verse within and between poems while retaining the distinction. What of dissolved metre and nearly metrical poems, do you think that there is life in that approach?
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Unread 10-04-2009, 11:24 PM
Andrew Frisardi Andrew Frisardi is offline
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That’s a fascinating interview. Thanks a lot, Jehanne and Quincy, for putting it together.

Quincy, I admire your sense of having something to say--a lot of poetry seems like it was written out of a general need to write a poem (any poem will do), rather than a need to say something in particular.

History is obviously a major part of what you want to say. In the interview, you talk about poetry as seen from the point of view of history. I’m curious: what are your thoughts, as a historian, about your academic field from the point of view of poetry? How (if at all) does your work as a poet affect your work as a historian?

Also, I was curious about this statement: “with Heimat, I was, in structure, trying to think symphonically, and I probably had certain late Romantic symphonies in mind more than any specifically literary models when writing it.” Could you elaborate on that a little more? In what ways, exactly, did late Romantic symphonies come into the design?
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Unread 10-04-2009, 11:30 PM
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Quincy Lehr Quincy Lehr is offline
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Peter--

Of course the approaches you mention are valid, and there are plenty of good examples of both. I'm hard-pressed to elaborate, as the point strikes me as pretty self-evident, if possibly controversial with a certain kind of formalist purist.

When writing in meter (as I do most of the time, actually), I tend to be pretty strict with stress counts but don't really sweat substitutions. Someone like Simon Armitage might play it a bit looser still and, hey, you can't argue with his results.

The thing is, it comes down to the sound you want, with technique being part of the way to get that sound. And I would hardly say that what I've done thus far or will do exhausts the permissible possibilities.

Quincy

Editing in to answer Andrew--When I was a teenager, if the bets were on what artistic field Quincy R. Lehr would follow, the smart money would have been on "guitarist with his own band." So music was always in the mix for me.

I suppose that with length, if one is not doing a straight narrative (and I'm almost invariably not), there have to be other ways of tying the extended piece together. So, when I think about extended music, you have two options. There's jazz/blues wank (it really goes better with LSD), or there's the composed tradition, which tends to appeal to me more. So you get your main themes, melodic lines and so forth. You know which ones are the biggies, which ones will come back, will be referenced in the other bits, perhaps rendered into 4/4 in one place, 6/8 in another, shifted into the relative minor in yet another variation.

So the idea was to link certain ideas with repetitions of phrases, stanza shapes, etc., often shifting them as the poem progresses, adding color and complexity as one goes on.

I suppose I also thought of the late Romantic era insofar as it starts, in its increasing chromaticism, to hint at what would come with Schoenberg and twelve-tone composition without quite going there, a possibility that strikes me as a possibility emerging from early twentieth-century American modernism that the formal-free verse dichotomy that should bore us all to tears nowadays reveals in a different way. Not the ghost of meter so much as a more varied, discretely applied meter, especially in extended composition.

Is that elaborate enough?

QRL

Last edited by Quincy Lehr; 10-09-2009 at 11:36 PM.
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Unread 10-04-2009, 11:55 PM
David Rosenthal David Rosenthal is offline
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Quincy,

Thanks for the generous and interesting response about writing Heimat.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Quincy Lehr View Post
Does that answer your question?
One of them (or one set of them, actually I think two sets of them). What about the "generational" business. I know I said "Answer what you will," but I am curious about what, if anything, you have to say in response.

David R.
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