1987 interview excerpt of Charles Entrekin by a University of California, Berkeley, PhD candidate from Czech Republic as part of his dissertation. Read by Eugene Berson.

 

Why I Write

Charles: When my mother died I didn’t want to go to the funeral really, but there were people who wanted to see me and wanted to make me feel all right about my mother dying.  So I went to the funeral and I bid everybody goodbye and then I came home and went to work and it was as if nothing had happened, as if I didn’t really have that experience.  I went through it, but I didn’t have it. Until I wrote that [April in Alabama] poem about my mother and then, then, it started coming back to life for me.  Then I knew what I had been doing.

It’s like enough emotional experiences get accumulated and finally I can find the space to deal with them.  Maybe the culture is so fast now, there is so much happening, that we don’t have time to process our experiences.  Times used to be slower, we used to have more time.  Poetry is a way of stopping time.  It’s a way of coming back to an experience.

April in Alabama

        for Ruth, my mother, who died after a 15-year battle with Parkinson’s disease

My father once shouted that she loved me best.
Now, again he stares without seeing, and yes,
I know he thinks I have her feel on me still.
Always she was so quiet, insisting without speaking,
always seeming to know she gave context, shape,
thickness to things.

And now her relations have arrived, her grandchildren,
dressed up, stage-whispery voices, this
quiet sobbing punctuating the sunny morning,
with a pack of Marlboros left on an end table,
coffee, truck roars from a nearby freeway,
and me, just in from California, like an unholy
ear, listening.

In chapel we sit with silent faces, dark
mahogany walls closing in. A hoarse cough
of a relative with a cold, echoes.

And now my cousin Rodney, no longer a boy
but a Mississippi preacher taking hold, speaks
and the background rush of our lives floats away
as the sound of his voice spreads over us,
honeyed and slow, “I remember times we’d come to comfort her,
worried and concerned, but she’d say, year after year
Go your way, there’s nothing you can do here,
go your way...”

Outside, a casket winds past the new chapel,
the gravesides and in the distance, kudzu
clings to the new leaves. Spring. Still Alabama
forests remain a muddy, monochromatic brown.
What stirs is the new busy noisiness in the humid air,
wasps and dirt daubers at their nests.

With everyone gone, like wind
I feel her out there, like fish and mosquitoes,
lakes, blowing grass, dead leaves, dung beetles,
bees. Yet there is an emptiness in the landscape
as when the dogwoods are in full bloom and no one notices,
a sadness like oil cans and abandoned shacks, empty stores
beside the highway, spirits that no one knows.

For me a good poem is one that, when I come back to it again and again, every time I get the same emotional hit, the same mood and experience again.  So it’s like a little time capsule of mood, of emotional experiences.  And a poem fails when it doesn’t do that, when it won’t take you back to that place anymore.  There’s something wrong about it [then] so that you can’t re-experience it, it’s not a movie anymore of that emotional state.

When it stops touching you, usually the reason is that there’s something wrong about it, it’s not lyrical enough, the images are not unified enough, and so it doesn’t hold up to re-exposure.   The really best poems don’t fall down under exposure.  The more you are exposed to them, the better you like them.  And when I was putting together In This Hour, I felt that all of those poems still worked in that way, and now I feel that about a third of them do.  Over time I’ve come to see that some of the poems don’t hold up, but others still do.  And they are old now; a couple of them are nearly 10 years old.  And they still hold up, they still do the same thing for me that they did when I wrote them.

So in a sense I write poems for that reason.  So that I can have that for myself.  So that I can have my life back.

 

How I Write

I don’t know what I’m going to write about when I begin.  I never plan for it.  I never even think about what it’s going to be about; it’s going to be about whatever comes into my head.  If I premeditate, if I really try to think ahead of time what I’m going to write about, I often muck it up.  Because my intellectual gear, which is pretty strong inside of me, like a censor, gets into gear and it starts censoring too soon and won’t allow me to do things that I need to do in order to get a good poem out of it.

Often, for me, when I’m writing a poem I have to write a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense initially.  I can’t see the connections, I can’t see the sense to it, and sometimes it’s really sentimental and sloppy and, if I get my intellectual gear into operation, I won’t allow myself to do it at all.  And so nothing comes out, or what does is dry, dead, more like an essay, diatribe, an investigation into abstract principles, and they don’t live at all.  They have no aura.  They don’t evoke anything.  They are either right or wrong.  They are understood or not understood, but what you understand of them is not worth reading.  Throw them away.

If the intellectual gear gets too much into the spirit of it, it dies.  I try not to; I try to leave myself as much room as I can to not.  Real unorganized and it might just be phrases.  I have a notebook that I write down phrases in, things that catch my attention, that sound right, and sometimes I go through that and let a phrase guide me.

…I have a whole notebook, several notebooks, that are filled with these kinds of things, odd thoughts, random images, just things that occur to me.  I used to do it a lot more than I do now just because lately I’ve been caught up in making money again.  But when I’m really in stride with writing poems and really in tune with it, I keep one of those books with me all the time and I write things down in it.  And there will be a line or two, or a word or two, that I’ll later use.

 

What a Poem is About and What the Poet Thinks it’s About

I have discovered something else too, this was something of a surprise actually.  I had arranged it once so that I had a job that I could work three days a week and have four days off that I could work pretty much on my poems.  And so I did, and I was writing a lot of poems.  And what I noticed was that over a period of time all the poems I was writing would be about the same thing.  They were all coming at it from different angles, but after I had written enough to look at them and see them, I could see that they were all trying to capture the same thing.

I was trying to think of a particular period.  It wouldn’t be something so specific that you could state it in an abstract way, or state as a principle, but it would have to do with a mood, a way of feeling about, for example, my mother’s dying.  And that mood was holding sway over everything that I was working on.  I was under the influence of that mood and so every time I came to write a poem, that mood would have its effect.  And so if I looked at all the poems together, I could see that that event, that mood was working its way out, and it was working its way out in my poems.

Earlier on, if I went back and looked at my poems, I could see that my relationship with my wife was going to hell, and that all of my poems were being affected by it.  I could see that every poem that I wrote was about, had an angle to it that was about, the relationship breaking down.  It was showing up in poem after poem.  As a matter of fact, it used to amaze me that my wife never noticed that.  She never did.  I didn’t notice myself for a while, and then I began picking up on it.  Then I saw what I was doing, and it was like there was this other person, that I was being let in on a secret, that I had been working it out, I was working out breaking up with my wife through poems.

I have one poem where it’s said outright, “The Dream of Leaving You”:

This dream about leaving you
begins with your clothes on the floor
and flowers falling from your hair;
then there’s an icy drink
at my elbow and the air
of a conversation that will not end,
The way time sits in your mouth
like cold sunshine and doors
wink open around you.

That was written near the end.  A number of the poems in my book are about that and catch it in its purest expression.  Here is a similar kind of thing, [in the poem, Objet D’Art, also from my book, Casting for the Cutthroat & Other Poems (1980)].  You wouldn’t think it had anything in common with the last poem unless you see them all together.  They are about different things, but it turns out I was writing toward the same thing.

In the beginning
there was the feeling of being found,
discovered,
the way he fit so neatly inside her
world view of things,
his appearance as it were,
and the armature of his being
becoming by necessity the base
which best displayed her beauty
so alarmingly.

Both of those poems are about a relationship going bad, in a way.  The second poem is about how he provides the base for her to be an art object, how he’s allowing himself to be used for that purpose.  And when I wrote it, I didn’t think it was necessarily about me.  And later on I could see, well, that it is about me.

I could sure find out what I’m up to by writing a poem.  And so I can sort of see why I start feeling a little bit lost and upset and fearful of things when I can’t write poems.  Because it has become a way of self-knowledge.

Interviewer: Yeah, I suppose that’s what attracts most people to go into it.

 

How Moving West Affected My Poetry

Yeah, yeah, it does.  In this book I talk to you about how I felt about coming to California, about Nature. This is a poem about being affected by the landscape that I lived in.  Have you ever been to Pt. Reyes?  It’s near you actually, if you go on farther north.  It’s got some of the most beautiful beaches in the world.  They’re really wild and rugged and everything.  This is called “Point Reyes Station.”

I stand at land’s edge,
fat buds barely
Breaking into green and
suddenly
there’s no sun,
no Alabama breeze,
only the Pacific cold mists
and this rising and falling
inside me. This longing
for roots, for no fear
of the forever false spring
that surrounds me.

That’s clearly a poem that was evoked by a real sense of lack of seasons.  As if this constancy of California was fearful, or was cloying, as if I wanted the purgation of winter, wanted thing[s] to have an end, a rebirth, a re-beginning, and the fact that it was always spring was really getting to me.  [On a practical level,] when I went to Montana, I had the feeling that I had really made a mistake because I had quit my job here, had taken my family and gone to this university to study and get my Master’s degree. We were living on 200 dollars a month.  Everybody had colds.  I thought we were really going to go under financially.  We were on welfare and things looked really pretty bleak.  And then after about six months of it, there came this wonderful springtime in Montana.  Missoula Spring.  Missoula is [a] town in Montana, but it means literally “by the chilling waters.”

Missoula Spring

        I have become
one of my own poems.
This morning
the covered streets
opened black
in melting snow.
I was wrong.
Winter gone, a flower
opens in me, a song, words
crawl in my veins,
a carnation of the brain,
a dogwood.

So, yeah, Nature definitely has a way of being part of it, but it’s the context again.  Things don’t make sense without their context and nature, the world we are living in.  That’s the most all-embracing context of all.  Lately I’ve been writing poems about nature, about how I seem to be an entity outside of nature, [but] affected [by], impacted by nature.  I think as the stages of my life move on, Nature means something different to me.

Interviewer: So where are you going to head with all of this, once you get it all collected?

 

What I Focus On

In the craft of the poem, crafting the poem, I spend a lot of time trying to evoke mood.  I think I want the mood more than anything else in the poem, the atmosphere of what’s happened, more than what has actually happened.  For that reason, I tend to pay more attention to a kind of painterly aspect of a poem, and the musical aspect of a poem, than the content of the poem.

In those last couple of poem[s] I read, I’m paying a lot of attention to how things look, what’s in the background, what’s in the foreground, what the experience is like, not for an interpretation of the experience but for the experience itself.  To capture it.  And the way I get at that is to try to get at the mood, what was the mood of that moment.  And the mood is often caught up in the environment, in nature, what’s going on in the physical world at that point in time.

 

The Role of Nature

Nature has a lot to do with it.  That’s why that poem about Point Reyes was so scary to me.  Suddenly I felt guarded because I wasn’t going to get the purgation of winter, I wasn’t going to get to go through this sort of emptying and dying out, so that things could be reborn.  I was going to get this continual sense of things growing up.  I think within me I used to worry that living here in California, no further development could come about.  It was almost like things couldn’t ever grow up because they couldn’t get strong enough, because they were in this constant kind of new birthing process, which never gave anything a chance to age.  Everything just got displaced by the next new thing, and when that went away, the next new thing.  It was like a kind of caldron of birthing going on here.

It was the way it felt coming from places like the East Coast, New York City, or down South.  I spent a lot of time in Alabama, where experiences are codified, extrapolated, spread out, developed.  You don’t let go of something until it’s finished.  You carry it all the way through and new things, new ideas, are few and far between.  They are very mistrusted, particularly in the South.  Anything that’s new is automatically suspect.

 

Hectored by the New

Whereas out here if it’s not brand new, it’s just not the latest thing, it’s not any good.  It’s sort of a reverse process.  It bothered me a lot because I felt emotionally unstable, destabilized, is how I felt.  How am I going to develop as a person, as a human being?  How am I going to get to the places I want to achieve for myself if I don’t give myself room to explore my experiences, if I’m going to constantly be caught up with the new, the new thing, the latest fad?  If I constantly have to deal with that?  But I’ve found that that hasn’t been the case.  It was just a difference in volume between the East Coast and California.  There is just a lot of variety of things going on here.  The cultural variety is just enormous. I don’t think anything at all now about going to a café and listening to two Iranians carry on a conversation in one corner and a Frenchman talking to an Australian in the other corner, and a couple of computer nerds sitting there rattling off about their computer programs.  That’s ordinary.  At first it was overwhelming, but it’s become ordinary for me now.

 

Poetry and the Inner Emotional Life

I’m writing poetry more focused on my own emotional trials, my own struggles.  What’s going on outside in the world is interesting and fascinating, but I’m not generally drawn to write poems about it.  It doesn’t pull me in.  I have to be emotionally affected by it.  It has to have some emotional punch for it to creep into my poetry.  Intellectually stimulating, and I don’t write poems about it.  These events are just not, for some reason, grist for me.  I think other people do, but it’s just not for me.

I identify myself with a tradition of poets that goes back to Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo, people who were influenced by Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, etc.  It’s a kind of poetry that deals with an interior landscape of emotions unlike another whole brand of poets that seem to be, that feel like they have a moral to preach or an idea to convey.  There is that whole side of poetry, but that doesn’t interest me very much.  I don’t spend much time on it.  And I’m not that excited by those kinds of poets.

 

How People Different from Myself, in Different Circumstances, Inform My Poetry

This poem isn’t in this book but in a different book.  It’s a similar one, where the experience of picking cotton, being thrown in with a group of people that I had really not had any experience rubbing shoulders with, people who did this for their livelihood, and feeling like I could just barely keep up with them, particularly this old man I was picking cotton with.  I felt really sad for him because I knew what I was going through, what it was doing to me to pick that one day, and he had been doing it for a long period of time.  And so I was moved later on, it was really odd, 20 or 30 years later.  Somehow that experience popped back into my head and I wrote this poem about it.

A Day’s Work

For so little pay, to move all day that weight
slung backwards, and watch the dust
cover my hands like a new skin,
to stagger behind a black man who pulls
forward like a horse in harness,
so much power in his arms and back,
to lift that white substance from the plant,
that feeling of the seed stuck in the center,
to stuff cotton balls in one smooth motion
without breaking stride,
‘til it’s sundown beside the oak,
beneath a red-varnished sky,
and an old man plopped down beside me,
wiping his eyes, face dust brown as mine,
saying, Damn wind done made me cry.

That’s sort of an external experience, but it affected me emotionally.  I got caught up in it.  I was moved by it.  Like I say, I spend a lot of time trying to capture the mood, and I spend a lot of time trying to use images that will capture the mood.  Like I purposely used “forward like a horse in harness, so much power in his arms and back, to lift that white substance from the plant,” juxtaposing white and black also because it’s the South and it’s a period of integration, but the meter, the rhythm of that is supposed to suggest a power and a kind of rhythm of picking cotton, “stepping, step-ping.”  It wasn’t really like that; it was more like “step-bend.”  It was a horrible experience; that people could do that for a living just amazed me.

There were these camp movies a while back, I don’t know whether you saw any of them; they are not animated but are almost cartoons anyway: Hulk and Conan the Barbarian movies.  When Conan’s woman gets killed, his compatriot is standing there by the stone, the wind is blowing the fire up around the bier as the woman’s body is burning, and an old man asks the compatriot, “Well, that’s not your woman.  Why are you crying?”  And he says, “Conan is a barbarian; he can’t cry.  Somebody has to; I cry for Conan.”

I don’t know consciously that I’m taking all these things into consideration when I go to write a poem.  I  don’t really.  I think it must be because I have a sense of the rightness of it when I get to the writing, trying to evoke it.  It’s like trying to write music, a sense of the musical expression that would hold the mood for some people.

 

Literal Time and How a Poem Gestates Meaning

Later on I was able to experience it.  Things stay with me for a long time.  It’s interesting because I must have carried that experience with me for years and years, never thought anything about it.  It was like I never processed it, never developed it.  It was like raw information that was unassembled.  But that’s the reason for my sense of pulling something out.  The pull makes sense.  Even though I went through the experience with that man and I watched it all happen, I didn’t have the feeling for that man until I wrote the poem.   It was like I was just there.  I was seeing it, I was witnessing it, I was going through it, but I was also tired, my bones were aching, I was covered with dirt, I felt like shit.  I had all these other things that were going on too, that were part of the current, the physical, the moment that it was happening to me.  And it was only later, much, much later in this case, 30 years later, that the experience came back to me and I began to make sense out of it so that it took on another whole life of importance for me that it wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t written that poem about it.  It just would have been like so much random experience.

It’s a shaping.  In talking about it right now again it sounds like taking an experience and shaping it, giving it form.  Also giving it punch, giving it significance, giving it weight, giving it meaning.  And an experience without that has none of those things, except what the culture gives you, the tools with which to interpret it.  You’re supposed to feel this way about this thing, and you breathe in these cultural expectations the way you breathe in the air, and so you experience what the culture teaches you to experience, you see what you’re allowed to see, you feel what you’re expected to feel.

 

How Meaning Gleaned From Writing Can Inform Your Family Relationships

I used to worry about my children being raised in Berkeley for that very reason.  I used to think, and I still do to some extent, that all the opinions, all the understandings that I worked so hard to develop for myself before I came here, are now available to my children like the air they breathe in.  They are going to get all these sophisticated ideas, sophisticated cultural understandings at no cost to them, no work, they put in no effort to get them.  Which makes me wonder, can they really understand them then, if they have the “correct opinions” without the underpinnings.

My son, my 15-year-old son, is arrogant with his liberal understanding of the rights and wrongs of the world, which he feels with great passion.  And most of his opinions I agree with because I thought my way through to them.  But I don’t feel the same arrogance about them because of all the steps, all the cultural understanding I had to reject, to get to them.  And he has not had to figure out his way through to these understandings; he has just breathed them in.

A little afield of our discussion.

Interviewer: Maybe this is what you’re leading up to: It may well be that since they haven’t had  to spend all their time to get to these kinds of opinions, maybe they can go forward from where they come in.  Maybe they have a base to stand on and don’t have to deal with a lot of shit that they don’t have to deal with.

Charles: But I don’t think so.  I really think that the process of figuring out things is in some ways the most important thing.  Learning the process, learning the ways to figure things out is more important than what is actually figured out.

It makes you look at it.  Were you there when I read the Rilke poem about the raising of Lazarus?  It was the very first poem that I read at that reading, but that to me is an example of it, that somebody could write a poem about an old Biblical story about the raising of Lazarus and get you excited about it is incredible.  I mean, he makes you sort of re-experience at least a possible perception of what it would have been like to be Jesus Christ trying to raise Lazarus from the dead for the reasons that he had to have for doing it.  You see Jesus saying to himself, “I don’t want to do this.  There’s no reason to go make this man come back to life, but I’ve got to do it.”

Jesus was able to look at the people, all following their own sense of things that they had taken from the culture, and see the larger picture, see something so huge that they had no idea.  The forces that are at work on you are at work on you, and you can’t see them.

What’s neat, I think, is Rilke showing us how Jesus could see the story from the context of the people’s lives, what they needed and what they were capable of receiving.  They’ve had a mother, they’ve had a father, they’ve had a place that they grew up in.  And they became the things that they have become because of the forces that were at work on them.

I don’t know, [but] what I was leading up to was I was thinking about Pablo Neruda from Chile, who was not much liked by the intellectuals but was greatly loved by poor people, and he is also a big hit in this country.  He’s very often likened to Walt Whitman in this country as a poet of the people, a man who is transforming poetry, particularly South American poetry, into a humanistic poetry like Walt Whitman did with poetry in the U.S.  And what he did, and the reason they loved him so much, was that he took their stories and found metaphors, truths in them, and he made their stories into poems so that they could see the whole.  He sort of reached down and pulled out of a pool a shape of something that made their stories, their struggles, visible to them.

This concludes this section of the interview.

 

The Raising of Lazarus

by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from the German by Franz Wright

Evidently, this was needed. Because people need
to be screamed at with proof.
But he knew his friends. Before they were
he knew them; and they knew
that he would never leave them
desolate here. So he let his exhausted eyes close
at first glimpse of the village.
And immediately he seemed to be standing in their
                     midst.
Here was Martha, the dead boy’s sister.
He knew he would always find her
at his right hand, and beside her
Mary. The one a whole world of whores
still called a whore. They were all here.
Yet opening his eyes it was not so.
He was standing apart,
even the two women
slowly backing away,
as if from concern for their good name.
Then he began to hear voices
muttering under their breath
quite distinctly;
or thinking, Lord, if you had been here
our friend might not have died. (At that,
he seemed to reach out
to touch someone’s face
with infinite gentleness,
and silently wept.) He asked them the way
to the grave. And he followed
behind them, preparing
to do what is not done
to that green silent place
where life and death are one. By then
all sorts of others had gathered
from sheer curiosity: leering across
at each other and keeping their own
shadowy distance, they followed behind
like a pack of starving dogs.
Merely to walk down this road
had started to feel like a test,
or a poorly prepared-for performance
with actors unsure of their lines,
or which play they were supposed to be in;
and gagging on self-contempt
the stench of desecration
he himself seemed to emit,
a feverish outrage rising inside him
at the glib ease with which words like “living”
and “being dead” rolled off their tongues.
And loathing flooded his body
when he hoarsely cried,
“Move the stone!”
“By now he must stink,”
somebody helpfully shouted.
(And it was true, the body
had been lying in the tomb
four days.) But he was far away,
too far away inside himself
to hear it, beginning
to fill with that gesture
which rose through him:
no hand this heavy
had ever been raised, no human hand
had ever reached this height
shining an instant in air, then
all at once clenching into itself
at the thought all the dead might return
from that tomb where the enormous
                     cocoon
of the corpse was beginning to stir.
In the end, though, nobody stood
there at its entrance
but the young man
who had freed his right arm
and was picking at his face,
at small strips of grave wrappings.
Peter looked across at Jesus
with an expression that seemed to say
You did it, or What have you done? And all
saw how their vague and inaccurate
life made room for him once more.

 

 

This poem, unpublished in the poet’s lifetime, appears in a notebook that the Austro-German Rilke (1875–1926) kept while in Ronda, Spain, in 1913. The translation was begun by Franz Wright decades ago (“I have been working on it, in a hundred versions, since I was in college,” he says). Wright’s most recent collection of poems is F (2013). His Walking to Martha’s Vineyard earned the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category.