F. Daniel Rzicznek’s books include Divination Machine (Parlor Press, 2009) and Neck of the World (Utah State University Press, 2007) He is also coeditor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice, forthcoming in 2010. He currently teaches at Bowling Green State University.
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F. Daniel Rzicznek Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand
Those are very insightful and interesting questions. St. Hubert’s role in the sequence was the very last piece of the puzzle. With the exceptions of “Trimmings” and “Trappings,” these poems were written three years ago. A year after that, I discovered St. Hubert in James Swan’s essential book The Sacred Art of Hunting. All hunters should own and study this book. The figure of St. Hubert spoke to me immediately and I learned what I could about him through a bit of online research. Strangely enough, both “Trimmings” and “Trappings” were originally part of an essay intended to serve as a preface of sorts to the five original poems, except that it never really ended up working. But I spent a lot of time extracting and refining the good parts while also adding new stuff. Really, I hadn’t thought to compare the narrator of the poems with Hubert’s figure as you’ve described it, but that description is very apt. Both do endure a period of ignorant brightness before the demand arrives to face some sort of truth, regardless of whatever darkness may accompany that truth. Maybe they’re even secretly hoping for the darkness most of all. I chose to focus on Hubert before his divine revelation, enduring another sort of transformation, although a less dramatic one. One reservation I have about using Hubert as such a loaded figure in the poems is that it might invite a too direct comparison between his historical and religious figure and the narrator of the poems (me), implying that I see myself as some kind of saint (not true) or that I see St. Hubert as some sort of ideal or standard. Also not true, because I recently learned that he spent a lot of time after his revelation trying (and sometimes succeeding) to thwart paganism. This is maybe where the bear enters the picture. I didn’t know about Hubert’s efforts to end paganism when I decided to introduce the bear, but I think I was picking up on a need for something mystical (not spiritual) to happen in the poem, but it had to be invented. I chose a bear because I love them and relate to them. Some North American native cultures believe that bears were once men and deserve special reverence. The bear in the poems represents a lot of things, but mostly it’s Hubert confronting and struggling to accept the animal side of himself. This is a struggle that my narrator-self also undergoes, but I think the outcomes are drastically different.
So much of these poems, in content and craft, masterfully deal with voice--as opposed to life: one life, many voices. How did you manage to craft so many voices--including the infinitely intricate one belonging to the narrator--while maintaining one overarching voice throughout? What was the process like? The use of parentheses, repetition, line breaks, sentence length, and densely stacked imagery is especially impressive in this regard.
This is a difficult question to address, because so much of writing for me is instinctive. I get ideas and I run with them. I’ve always written poems not from my own immediate perspective, so it feels entirely natural to me to inhabit “many voices,” as you say, to get a fuller picture of the “one life.” That’s an essential process for me, one I’ve been exploring for years now. I’m weary of writing that focuses only on the “I”: me, me, me, look at me, my life is incredible, listen to me, goddamnit! Unless you’re Hunter S. Thompson or another master embellisher, then, no, I don’t really want to listen. The human perspective is one of countless perspectives, so why not write as a silverfish or a corkscrew or a chickadee? Or the ghost of a chickadee? Of course, it’s a human doing the writing, so that perspective is still present, but it’s twisted and challenged by the notion of translation into the terms of another being or object. This interests me endlessly and the more I think about it, the more the notion of traditionally confessional poems irritates me, to the point where even these poems of mine you’re publishing make me a little weary. There’s a lot more “I,” a more intense focus on personal history and experience in these poems than I usually entertain in my work. This is purely the result of subject matter. By choosing to write about attention deficit disorder and to start uncovering, layer by layer, the drama of my own rather unexciting past, I knew that it all had to be conveyed by voice. The process of writing the poems (besides “Trimmings” and “Trappings”) involved several weeks of outdoor fires, three or four Neil Young albums played on constant repeat, and entire cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I’m not joking here and neither do I intend it as any sort of possible advice. These things were the main stimuli, especially for the more relentless pieces like “The Playground,” “The Medicine,” and “Doctor’s Doctor.” That was the voice and writing so much of my own “I” left me half-deranged for a while. The others, that weren’t in my own voice, were far easier because I had been writing in different voices for several years before that. I find it pleasantly curious that I was more comfortable writing as a playground or a pill than as myself, but those long “I” poems really invited me to challenge my own notion of what a sentence can do on a large scale. I’m glad you think the punctuation in particular is adding something to the poems. For the three poems mentioned above, I made the decision to change all periods (and certain commas) to semi-colons as a final gesture toward fluidity and immensity, further dimensions to the “I.”
At times, as in the seventh section of "Trimmings," your poems become self-referential--a dangerous move in poetry, yet it works in these poems. These acknowledgments of a writer behind the words become very intimate, confessional moments that contribute to the way these poems feel completely genuine and true. How did you get this to work? How did you insert the very essence of the narrator--and his voice--into these poems--and is it related to these confessional moments (some of which are in parentheses)? Do these confessional moments work so well at least in part because of their relation to the themes of voice and distraction?
Another great question here. I don’t know if I got the moments of self-reference to work or not, but you seem to think I did, which makes me happy. I’m very skeptical of so-called “confessional” poetry, because the term has a religious overtone and implies something extraordinary about the speaker. In fact I don’t think the term is all that useful beyond establishing that the author is writing about his or her self/life/world, which is obvious from the start, no matter the subject matter. Art disconnected from life is simply bullshit. We need the tension between the two for the former to work. You’ve asked me how I inserted the narrator into the poems, and the answer is simple: he’s me. The poems are about my life and childhood. While the process was taxing (based in large part on the huge, sprawling forms I chose) the actual voicing of the narrator wasn’t as difficult. I just tried to speak from that part of myself, and I tried to speak directly, without boiling anything down, but instead blowing things up, making them bigger and more inclusive of the world beyond “I”. The poems are more about the experience of the speaking than what’s actually being said and I’ve tried to include the process in the poems. Walk through a museum and look at the dinosaur bones. Incredible, but think about the process of digging them up. The poems are reports of their own processes, an attempt to make the process and the result inseparable. I’m not saying it’s a successful attempt, but that was the principle I came up with to dictate my choices, and I think the level of disclosure and speaking to (not at) the reader maybe allowed me a bit of leeway to get away with the parenthetical asides you’re picking up on. They felt natural to me when I was writing them, and this idea of distraction has a whole lot to do with it. I willingly let distraction enter the compositional process. My mind and my writing are holding mirrors up to one another in these poems, trying to find some new angles, maybe catch the other when it’s not looking, even though that would be impossible.
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