Friday Nov 22

On Hiatus

Robert Krut - Poetry

Robert Krut is the author of The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including recent issues of Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, Inter/rupture, Arroyo Literary Review, Radioactive Moat, and more. He teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Robert Krut Interview, with Mari L’Esperance
 
 
I first discovered your work via an evocative video of your poem "Hold Me, The Walls Are Falling" that I stumbled across online . I like it so much (and I'm assuming that's you reading it?). The stark images of a downtown Los Angeles that's fallen into decay, coupled with your haunting poem, combine beautifully and powerfully. Can you say a bit about the poem and then also how the video came to be?
 
Downtown Los Angeles is so fertile in terms of inspiration—I find it nearly impossible to leave there without a poem in mind. Not all of them work, of course, but in terms of location, I can’t think of another place that so consistently sparks writing for me. There are the obvious reasons—everything you come across is evocative, from the most knocked-down, long-dead theater sign to the shiniest neon script for a place like the Orpheum. I think, too, real sparks come from the historic spots (the Bradbury Building, Clifton’s, Angel’s Flight, and such) hitting the cold slap of the modern world. Not to make it simply seem like some artifact for potential literary inspiration—it’s just that the mix of the current and historic really excites me, writing-wise.
 
I’ve really enjoyed some of the literary videos I’ve seen over the past few years. The first I remember seeing, and that’s still one of my favorites, was the “trailer” for Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, but there have been many that have stood out recently. Over time, I had considered trying my hand at one, and a few months back at a party, my friend Nick mentioned that he had just started a video production company, and wanted to try something based in the literary world. I liked the videos he had already done, and had always really respected him as an artist, so I was glad he was interested in working together. We looked at a few poems, but kept going back to this one (which initially appeared in the great online journal Poetry Vinyl), at which point the setting and images for the video seemed pretty clear. I recorded the reading at his house, we got in the car, and spent the day shooting downtown.
 
Most of the shots were decided on once we got down there, but there were a few I knew I wanted to include. We arrived a bit before sundown, so we could get some shots in the day, and some in the dark. Luckily as well, one of Nick’s close friends lived in the amazing Eastern Building (it’s the back of his head, actually, seen in the first image), so we were able to get those rooftop shots. I never expected to get images from that vantage point, so that was a nice bonus.
 
 
You live in L. A., but teach at UCSB (that's the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the uninitiated). Are you originally from Southern California? If so, do the landscape and culture of the region make their way into much of your writing? If you're not from So. CA, how did you find your way there? And what's it like to be a poet in Los Angeles?
 
I do indeed live in Los Angeles, and teach at UCSB, which, if you’re familiar with the map of California, is a bit of a hike, so I sort of live in two different worlds. I love that, though—L. A. and Santa Barbara are very different places, and I get to have a foot in each. I moved out here a couple of years ago, as Sarah (my longtime girlfriend) is an actor, and the time had come for us to try living and working out here. I literally drew a 90-mile radius around L. A. and applied at every school that had an opening. Of course, I got an offer from the one at the exact 90-mile mark. All worked out, though—I love teaching at UCSB, and the program is incredibly warm and supportive.
 
I’m not originally from California (I grew up in New Jersey), but did feel instantly at home here. There’s a great passage in David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish,where he mentions experiencing the light in Los Angeles for the first time, and he gets it right—there is a certain quality to the sunlight out here unlike anywhere else. Not better or worse, just different—and I took to it immediately. Plus, I really love the city and the sort of history out here. I like that I can be walking down a street and know that Raymond Chandler was a regular at the restaurant I just passed. Even in the neighborhood where we live (our house was built, along with the others around us, by the studios in the thirties as film was booming), I can see the Warner Brothers lot from our backyard.
 
Being a poet in Los Angeles is, as you may have gathered from my last response, exciting, as there is so much inspiration around. It constantly works into my writing. There are a lot of wonderful resources and reading series in town—and in my experience, these are all welcoming, supportive venues.
 
 
You earned your MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Who were some of your teachers there and how were they helpful to you and your poems? What were the post-MFA years like for you? And what was the process like of putting together your manuscript that eventually became your first collection The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009)?
 
The teachers were what initially brought me to ASU, in fact. First, I read Norman Dubie voraciously during my last two years as an undergraduate, and I really hoped to work with him at some point. Naturally, it was his work that drew me there, but his teaching and mentorship were exactly what I’d hoped for, and needed. All these years later I still hear conversations we had, and notes he offered, while I’m working on new pieces. Second, while I was starting to apply to programs, Ron Carlson gave an interview with AWP centered on “how to know if you should get an MFA” (I’m paraphrasing the title), and it really moved me. I had been a big fan of his work—in fact, as a good luck gift for the first poetry reading I ever did in college, my parents sent me a copy of one of his collections—so, even though I was going to study poetry, I did hope to work with him (which I did, more from a “teaching of writing” vantage point—I still use many of the lessons from those days in my classes).
 
One of the great things about ASU was that, when I got there, all of the teachers were so strong. Before arriving, I hadn’t read Beckian Fritz Goldberg, and almost instantly, I connected with her work in a powerful way, as the sort of writing I hoped to be doing myself. The fact that she was such an enthusiastic mentor was frosting on the cake, so to speak. She still inspires me—she’s one of those writers who always make me want to write more. I worked with Norman and Beckian the most, but I had important, rewarding experiences with all of the faculty: Alberto Rios, Jeannine Savard, and Jeanne E. Clark were all wonderful. I’m still amazed by how hands-on they all were, and the amount of time they gave to each of us.
 
After graduating from ASU, I moved to Atlanta, where I first taught through a non-profit program that brought fine arts classes to underfunded high schools around the city, and then at Georgia State University for a few years. During that time period, the manuscript that ultimately became The Spider Sermons was a lump of poems that I considered a “book,” but it was really just the batch of pieces I left grad school with (even though I was wisely warned to avoid doing just that). Little by little, those pieces were replaced with new ones. At various points, I considered the book “done,” but really, it wasn’t—it mutated a lot until at a certain point everything clicked. Around the time I decided to change the title to The Spider Sermons, it seemed clear what the manuscript was trying to do. Adding to that was the fact that I wrote the first and last poems in the book around the same time, and everything seemed to funnel into the shape it was meant to take.
 
 
Your poem "Heart Mountain" reads like a scene from a dream, myth, or fable. It resonates with something ancient and archetypal. Can you tell us about the genesis of your poem?
 
It’s really, in a lot of ways, a continuation of your last question, about Arizona. Like a lot of people—particularly if you grew up in the Northeast—arriving in the Southwest is like landing on the moon. Immediately on moving there, I fell in love with the desert. I consider myself really lucky that I had those years in Arizona to not only study writing in the literal sense, but to have had the opportunity to live so close to the desert. Tempe, of course, isn’t exactly living in the middle of nowhere, but it doesn’t take long to get lost in the southwestern landscape, especially if it’s all new to you. In addition to the typical exploring, there were quite a few times when I’d hit the road in the middle of the night and just wind up wherever I’d wind up. It’s actually kind of funny because my friends would give me a hard time, as most nights I would head home by around eleven to talk to Sarah (who was across the country during that time), which could make me seem a bit like a homebody. Many of those nights, though, continued with my beat-up Toyota on Highway 60 out of town.
 
The poem here actually dates back to one of those very first experiences, and had been kicking around for a long time—one of my first two a.m. drives was through Superior, through Globe, and winding into the Superstition Mountains. “Heart Mountain” comes straight out of being pulled over, at the base of the range, all of those years ago. It was certainly a dream-like state, being so early in my time there, and that’s where a lot of the images in the piece came from—seeing the ridges in the rock as muscle, the bats coming out, and some slightly off-key organ music underlying the voices I was hearing. I had many powerful experiences in the desert, but that was one of the most resonant.
 
 
Outside of writing and teaching, what interests and activities feed your creative life? And are you writing poems toward a second collection?
 
Simply living here in California promotes a creative lifestyle—for me, at least. By which I mean, nearly everyone out here is working on something, whether it is writing, directing, acting… but even people not in those direct areas are working behind the curtain. Just about everyone is connected to creative endeavors. It is easy to be snarky about that, to roll eyes at all of the people with laptops in the coffee shop working on screenplays, etc., or find it exhausting, considering how hard it is to actually succeed. But, all in all, I find it comforting that everyone is constantly trying to make something. And, of course, the fact that I share a home life with someone else in the arts—someone so talented—helps keep creativity a constant in my life.
 
The biggest thing I try to keep in mind, as hippie-esque as this may sound, is to just be awake for everything, whether it is simply making coffee in the morning or having some sparkly adventure in the middle of the night. In the past month, I wrote a poem inspired by a guy who was just sitting in his car for an hour across the street and one based on being inside a strobe light-infused nightclub in Hollywood, and both required the same amount of presence. I just try to take whatever rolls along and go with it, and take it all in, and that works into the writing. I was recently able to spend a few months living in New Orleans, as Sarah was working there for a while. At the time, I didn’t write much (in retrospect, I think I was a little paralyzed by the fear of succumbing to typical clichés about the city), but just lived there, taking it all in. Now that I’m back, I’ve started writing again, and didn’t even consider them “New Orleans poems,” but a friend of mine pointed out, “Well, this is definitely your Louisiana sequence!” So, things leak through.
 
I feel like my second collection has just taken shape, after being a bit amoeba-like for a while. One or two recent poems made me realize how the skeleton was meant to be assembled. With the first book, it was a sign that I was done when I was writing pieces that seemed clearly meant for the next collection, and that’s where I am now. Of course, saying it out loud like this could easily make me rethink everything—I could wake up tomorrow and dismantle the whole thing and start over. Stranger things have happened.
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Heart Mountain
 
 
Hidden beneath night’s shadow-blanket,
you’ve stumbled upon the coyotes
who make bonfires, standing
upright, thinking no one is watching.
 
Their smoke signals open the mountain—
it turns inside out, rock
inverting to raw muscle,
bats released from its cold ropes.
 
Once you’ve seen this, you can’t un-see it—
once you’ve tried to rename your fingerprints
with stone, they don’t change back,
if only out of spite.
 
Once you’ve watched this,
the blink-world beyond
waking life, there’s no going back—
you will sell sermons to serpents
 
from atop a hillside that hides
the beating of a thousand anonymous,
oblivious hearts.
 
 
 
The Engine Is An Amplifier, The Headlights Are My Headphones
 
 
The car’s engine an amplifier and every touch of the gas
a chord that echoes through the pine barrens
and settles on long-forgotten swamplands.
 
My ghost and I sit side-by-side, lit
by the radio scroll glow, finishing each other’s
sentences and rolling down the windows in unison.
 
I’ll leave a trail of gasoline behind,
sparking to fire from sheer will, leaving
a thin rope of ash behind me, a chalky flatline.
 
Listen, this is how it all goes down,
and before I can turn the car around in a gravelly shoulder,
before I stand in the hushed sway of branches,
 
before I stroll in front of the car, entering the
collapsed pillars of headlight illumination
to hear the melody of a song I don’t recognize,
 
before I lose time and space in that light,
I will beg for the sound to blare out my memory
like a blowtorch on a forty-five.
 
 
 
Tree Line
 
 
This is where birds lift
just below the sun, eyelids
in their beaks, stitching a blanket
to blink the light.
 
Tonight, the palm trees don’t lilt
from wind, but exhaustion.
 
I don’t remember getting the tattoo
of your life story across my back,
but it’s there, it’s there,
and all I wanted to do was show you.
 
Fronds dive to the pavement at sight
of the approaching clouds,
make wings around us.
 
You brushed aside a strand of hair,
whispered a secret
before I could.
 
I said, it’s raining,
and you said, those are stones.