Tony Tost

Do you have a particular audience in mind when you're writing?

Well, there's a lot of platitudes I could serve up to answer this—I write for me, for an ideal audience, for 'the public at large', for other poets, for future English majors—all of which assume a certain amount of self-knowledge & certitude over the writing act.  Which strikes me, in my case, as inaccurate. But writing is also not a mystery; I usually know exactly what I'm doing, or what I want to do. Or, to try to use Jack Spicer's framework, I know what pieces of furniture I'm placing throughout the room for the resident aliens to rearrange into poetry.

I'm aware of audience, hazily. I'm also aware of myself as a reader, & how little patience I have for writers or artists who seem to have too many eyes on the audience (when they should have them on the prize, so to speak). Off & on I think of Bob Dylan's relationship with audience, at least in those earlier years, of his 'going electric' as his big play in the endless power struggle between the artist who wants autonomy & praise, and the audience that wants the artist to fulfill its expectations (or to exceed its expectations in ways it expects & approves). Dylan used volume & his own mastery to counter the audience (in response to taunts of "Judas" he turns to his band and sneers "Play fucking loud" right before launching into "Like a Rolling Stone"; he doesn't sneer "play fucking precise"), to force them to grant him autonomy, challenging them to praise his authority.  It's an interesting stance. I wonder if a poet can do something similar. Narrative is one option, I guess, for capturing an audience & asserting one's will; perhaps creating a compelling self-myth (Plath, Pound, Frank Stanford) is another. And by self-myth I don't just mean creating an interesting biography, or of dying young and beautiful, but of tying up the work with the life in such a manner that it becomes a kind of allegory, of whatever kind. This is kind of vague to me. But doesn't what we know, or think we know, of Dickinson's life inform the poems, and vice versa?  Doesn't it seem to follow in this manner with many poets: Stevens, WCW, Stein, Hughes, Spicer, Bishop? Maybe when people bemoan the fact that so many poets have entered academia, they aren't bemoaning the quality of poetry, because I think by any measure the poetry of the last 40 years has been amazing. Perhaps people are bemoaning the absence of variety in the biographies & trajectories to tie together with the work, thus the lack of myth-like figures (except for the endless parade of poets who are both Prometheus and vulture).

So far none of this has addressed a writer's own relationship as the creator (or at least the catalyst) & first reader of the work. My answer so far seems to assume a one-to-one correspondence between the work and the poet. This is all very vague and off-the-cuff, but I'm trying to present an answer that doesn't make me gag. I think for myself I work best when I don't think of audience as a general plurality, but of a single reader. But I think it's a mistake to only think of a single poem as the only possible currency in this relationship—realistically, from my own experience, any worthwhile relationships I have with a writer's work usually occur in the following units: a book, a 'phase' or period in a writer's work, or in the body of work as a whole. So I'm trying to begin conceptualizing my writing life in these terms, of approaching the above units in a fruitful manner.

When I was a kid I'd go into the woods after the snow & make tracks: first normal tracks, then I'd hop on one foot, or drag a foot, or backtrack and create small mysteries or dramas (why'd the footprints stop at the tree? why aren't there footprints away from the tree and back out of the woods? did Tony climb the tree? did a bear eat 'im?) in case anyone coming in after me was paying attention. That might be a little bit of a precious metaphor, but I think it captures, to a degree, some of my impulses. 

How much do you think a poet's life influences the risk-taking in their work?

I don't think I take that many risks in my poems, & I'm unsure how much my life influences that. I don't know what "real" risks I can make.  I guess I could write poems about intricate assassination plots concerning actual politicians or celebrities, or realistic narratives about molesting a bald eagle, or things like that (carried to whatever degree), and that might be risk-taking in terms of my own well-being. But I have no interest, that I know of, of writing about the above. I suppose if I found it necessary to write about the above, for whatever reason, I'd hope my considerations over whether or not to do so would be more concerned with ethical & aesthetic matters than with risk-taking ones.

Race & sex matters pop up in my writing. I don't know if it'd be risky for me to pursue these matters more extensively, to wrestle on the page certain prejudices that I believe I still carry, however far down, & that are perpetuated in the culture & language, & how we use language to brush aside or laugh at these prejudices. In my in-progress manuscript there's a returning image of a speaker 'giving head': to ideas, to words, to a donkey, to another man. Is this risky? I don't fear for my safety or future job prospects when others read these poems. Maybe if I get too offensive I'll risk being labeled a sexist or racist or pervert, but sometimes I'm not sure I'm not a sexist or racist person, despite my best intentions.  I'm probably a pervert as well.

I wonder who's taking real risks in their poems in a way that threatens their livelihood and/or health (my own definition of risk)? & should one "expect" artists to always take risks? (how far do we carry the 'risk wish'? do I want my barber taking risks with every snip? & how much do I want my bartender to express himself when he mixes me a drink? etc.)

Amiri Baraka angered a lot of people, but he's not (I hope) at risk in terms of his livelihood or well-being. Experimental poets get tenure too. For whatever reason I don't want to make an automatic fetish out of risk-taking, or being underground/experimental/etc. It's a success of the last 50 years of poetry that there seems to be tangible communities available for the poet who wants to fly the New Formalist or Post-Avant or Confessional or whatever flag.

I don't think I, as a poet, have to always take risks—but I should be willing to take them if that's what it takes to do the voodoo. One can 'risk' becoming unknown, or a poetic hermit, but that assumes those states are intrinsically negative, states to risk falling into; I wonder if it's peculiarly American or modern trait to assume that one deserves and is entitled to an audience? Or if that's just a human trait. People talk about risking not being read in a hundred years, & that seems ridiculous to me, like house dogs fretting whether or not anyone's going to remember their greatest late night howls a hundred years from now.

It's a contemporary American privilege, I know, to speak of risk as flippantly as this.

I didn't really think of making Invisible Bride all prose as a risk—there's a long tradition of prose poetry, & models for it everywhere, from Rosmarie Waldrop & Joe Wenderoth to John Ashbery & Lyn Hejinian. That particular choice, however long it took me (it took a while to realize it), didn't arise from a sense of edginess, but instead from a sense of aesthetics: the poems simply worked better, for me, as blocks of prose.

I could say that the real risk is in writing things I can't reread or share with others or that don't live up to my aesthetic ideals—I'd be right in saying that, I think. But I'd also be right in saying that those things would also be risks worth taking.

Campbell McGrath will revise the same poem for ten years. Elizabeth Bishop left blank spots in her drafts where she could not find the perfect word and would hang these draft on her wall. Robert Lowell put his poems through hundreds of drafts, and Donald Hall reports that some of his poems go through 600 revisions. Yet, Bukowski revised little as did Ginsberg. How much does revision play a role in your method?

I had problems with one of my professors in grad school because I didn't follow the Lowell/Hall model. At the end of the semester we were supposed to turn in revised copies of poems we'd bring to workshop. I more or less brought in either unaltered copies of poems that I thought were fine as they were when I turned them in the first time, or, in place of poems that I didn't think worked, I brought in new poems.

To use a common metaphor, I didn't think some of my poems had engines in them, so I didn't see the point of polishing them. Which I still believe to a point. There's a bunch of stuff that I write that's just not worth the time. I mean, I could revise it over & over again, but these things still wouldn't be all that interesting. They're kind of dumb. For instance I thought it'd be interesting to write a quasi-offensive poem about low-riders. It's a pretty awful poem, & even if I sent copy after copy to Donald Hall or whomever, nothing's really going to change that. I could maybe tighten up some phrases & sharpen the imagery & insert striking similes & such, but the poem would still suck.

I'm working on the last piece of my next manuscript, which seems like it'll be at least 40 pages, & each day I read all I've written so far & then jump in. If a sentence (there's a model set up for this piece—one aspect is that it's made of discrete sentences) doesn't work, I'll as often erase it & start from scratch as I tinker with it. I'm trying to create an intelligence in this thing & to push with the full force of my abilities, sentence by sentence. Steadily giving forth! As often or not a sentence will just not hold up to the surrounding sentences, & when that happens I delete the flaccid sentence & start over.

These are the sentences I've written so far today for the piece:

 My problems arouse me : the flowerings infected,
steadily giving forth, hysterical.
   Thus I am like a woman & need these things
explained to me.
   A finger has an eye & an ear & other openings.
   A knife in the sun.
   Although my cradle was burned hours ago I still am
sleep.
   Every month I think of my family for a solid hour,
of smallness facing the world,
 

I haven't finished that last sentence yet, & chances are I'll rewrite it again tomorrow, starting with "every" & rethinking my approach. The strongest sentence in the above grouping, I think, is the fairly offensive "Thus I am like a woman" one, if only because it seems to pin a voice down for a moment: it explicitly presents a value system. It's hopefully the magnet for the surrounding sentences. My first impulse, then, in the "Every month" sentence I'm working on, is to try to create an almost pitiable sentence, one to empathize with. Just out of sheer meanness, perhaps, I enjoy the idea of trying to turn up the velocity from a pretty obnoxiously sexist statement through indeterminate poetic observations to a sentence about family & fear that most readers will maybe identify with. So there's a certain energy I'm trying to create, as well as an impression of immediate, unscripted, accidental utterance. I'm also seeing to what degree I'm willing to push language into value systems that I don't share, even if I'm doing so with some ironic distance. If it takes me ten years to do these things then I should find a different job. I'm hoping to create this energy-pattern either after I finish typing this email or first thing tomorrow morning, maybe after taking a shower. Then I'll write some more sentences & see what energies I can exploit from those. So that's my approach to revision right this second.