Liam RectorAbout the Money
When they say it's not about the money, it's about the money.
--Anon.
By the turn of the century Talking about the money Replaced talking about the sex, Talking about one's so-called Religious life, and all that Earlier yak about the psyche. Talking about the money Got down to it and captured The hunger, the hope, The love, and the fear: Let me hear your money talk, Many sang. Money was a good time (What people want most is Good times and insurance?) And money picked up The garbage the following Morning. (Someone's Got to do it and someone gets Money to do it.) There was Really nothing like talking About the money if you wanted To really get to know someone, To get to know what animated, What moved the American. Do me. Do it to me, honey. Do my money. Let's get cynical: Let me hear your money talk.
In My Memory EddieGreat-Uncle Eddie Came to see us in the country. Eddie looked exactly Like Fred Astaire, floating Fred Astaire (and Eddie For some reason had on A tuxedo, top hat, and spats). I loved Eddie. At eight I was already Gone to the movies. And Eddie looked exactly Like a world just beyond, Like a well-lit city just over The hill. (I could not imagine How Eddie came out of anything Resembling our family.) Eventually Eddie hanged himself: just kicked out The stool beneath him and, after What I imagine was a brief struggle On a lonely day for Eddie, Eddie Was gone. And when I asked My grandmother what would make Eddie Do such a thing, she, in a moment Of uncharacteristic candor, Said Eddie simply could not stand Getting older. I did not know it At the time, but Eddie Had already transported me (Much as Astaire transported, Much as startling art transports) Towards the city, no matter How much I loved the country. (My grandmother said before I left She could understand how I felt About Eddie, and she apologized For allowing me to so often sit up late with her And experience What she suddenly called "Too many movies.") And now that I live In New York City, Where nights Of top hats, champagne, And limousines actually are Part of life, I, when really dressed, Always raise a glass to Eddie. I raise a glass to Eddie and to a time When men believed so deeply In style (or at least in Their clothes) (or at least in the movies) That when those men died (at least When they chose to exercise The option of ending themselves By hanging) They had the decency, Before they kicked out their stools (And I have documentation To support this), They had the damned decency To make sure They died with their hats on. And these days I find My greatest transport (outside The movies, where I still live) By remembering such days As when Eddie Came to visit us In the country.
from An interview by Sarah Kanning
Sarah Kanning: You've been at work on a new collection of poems. Is it too early to talk about that, or would you be willing to comment on directions your poetry has been going in?Liam Rector: I've recently finished a book of poems, The Executive Director of the Fallen World, so this is a good time to speak. One thing I've noticed recently, in particular, is how much my current work is committed prosodically to the three-line stanza, which I envision as a tube through which things pass with a centrifugal motion and force, much as water passes through a simple garden-hose with water rushing towards the green world, or through a fire-hose with water making its way towards the fire, for instance. Some of this I learned from A.R. Ammons, in books such as Sphere. It's different from the looser associative vortextual and montage forms I used to so much work with and within (the school of "ellipticism" Stephen Burt has written interestingly about). I love the simplicity, the thru-line, and the sheer propulsion of the triadic stanza, as I've practiced it consistently in the new book.
I also notice that I have substantially walked away from ingenuity of image towards what I would call more "pure voice." I'll sacrifice or add anything that will contribute to the voice (which I also associate with the musics and rhythms) of any poem.
And since I faced several potentially fatal illnesses for a time, I'm now much more intent upon emotion and emotional integrity and thru-line in poems.
I taught with Henri Cole recently at Bennington and we were astonished, given our very different aesthetics, about how much we agreed about the place of emotion in poems. How to put it there, how to move it, and what the enormous consequences are when it's there and what the great poverties and failures are when it's absent.
I don't like the scent or sounds of poetry that seems like mere "writing." After being interested in and even defending so-called "Language" poetry for some time, I find myself now detesting it and its pernicious influence on younger poets. It seems to me it's become a kind of instant Kool-Aid avant-garde pretense and a dead-end, aesthetically.
There are interesting "Language" poets we could all name--Anne Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, and a few others--whose work is accomplished and realized within an aesthetic that is by now definable and retains powerful parameters, even if almost all of it has by now well lost its original suggestiveness. Most of what's now rightly called "Language" poetry debases the currency and legacy of its main modern precursors: Stein, Ashbery, and Creeley. It's B-O-R-I-N-G.
The better emerging poets now have chewed on it, absorbed its moment, digested it, defecated, and moved well beyond it.
I always somehow come back to voice and music. I come back to Rilke's "need to speak," which invariably creates any reader's consequent need to listen. Voice is wonderfully personal, without being a high school display of conditioned jejune "personality," and voice (real voice) is always somehow importantly impersonal, allowing a reader to read for his or her self, without the suffocating need to confront any poet's neurotic need for being liked or for approval. The need for approval is a tragic flaw in a leader. All writers worth reading are leaders to their readers, while servants at the same time.
Character is smarter, deeper, more imaginative, and character goes farther than personality. Character is voice and voice character.
SK: Would you be willing to say more about how those illnesses affected your writing and how you see or approach your writing?
LR: In the '90s I had a heart attack one October, followed quickly by a quadruple bypass, and then months later in January I found I had third-stage colon cancer. (Stage four is death.) As the fiction writer Alice Mattison said to me at the time, my life was suffering from an excess of plot. So I was literally laid up for a while, and put the heart stuff on the backburner while I fought the cancer head-on, with simultaneous chemotherapy and radiation. My two main battle cries then: Fight to live; prepare to die. I've since walked out of those forests and back into good health.
My entire life reading philosophy, psychology, theatre, and other things was also always flooding me during that time. (It is a very good thing on what seems a deathbed to have been a "fine arts major;" it's very practical, among other things.) The one thing most pronounced in all that flooded up was the emotional core in everything I remembered and found important, and I swore that if I made it through this vale of tears I would never forget that, and I don't think I have.
Liam Rector's new book of poems, The Executive Director of the Fallen World, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. He lives in New York City.
Sarah Kanning lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas. Her writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Field, and 5AM.
