“Latest edition” implies there’s been some amount of attention to this American novel, when the really hasn’t been.  It’s a book that’s fallen over the cliff of literary history.  The novel is by a neglected New England writer called Sylvester Judd (1813—53).  Set in the turbulent years following the American revolution, it’s the story of a young woman’s attempt to overcome the poverty and vice of her surroundings to establish the utopian ideals of the nation in her New England village.  I became aware of the book when I was researching American literature as a post-doc at Harvard.  I became interested in the question of why there was such a frenzy of utopian activity in the United States in the 1840s.  A bunch of utopian communes sprang up all over the country.  Reading into the history of the period, I became aware of this novel called Margaret–a novel all about the establishment of a utopian community, but also much more than that.  It’s the closest thing we have to a “Transcendental novel,” and it’s a breathtaking, encyclopedic introduction to the culture of the mid-nineteenth century.  It’s all in there!

In your introduction, you remark that the novel is revolutionary in depicting a heroine who grows “in social rather than domestic power.” Would you consider this a feminist text?

I’d say it’s somewhere between a feminist and a religious text.  It’s important to realize the restricted space of female protagonists in the literature of this period.  The only power available to women characters was in a domestic space.  The ideal for women, according to the ideology of the time, was to be the Angel in the Home.  Margaret takes her feminine and spiritual power out into the world, designing a society based on her transcendent selfhood.  Scholars tend to read the Bildungsroman (the “coming-of-age” novel) as a kind of fiction in which the protagonist comes to accept the conventions of society.  But in Margaret it’s the reverse: society changes to reflect the demands of self.  It’s an interesting twist.

How do you think the creation of a female protagonist such as this one is complicated by the fact that the novelist was male?

Perhaps the radical quality of the work emerges because the novelist was male. He was able to see beyond many of the ideologies of his culture.  Hence he was able to take a story involving a female character and interweave it with themes far beyond the scope of gender–themes of ecology, social justice, and political history, to mention just a few.

Why have you chosen to concentrate much of your scholarship on American literature–what fascinates you about it?

This is a question I’ve just been addressing in an undergraduate seminar on Antebellum American literature and culture.  The students seemed much more familiar with the British literary tradition, and I think they were surprised by the style and structure of many of the American texts we read–works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  I became interested in American literature when a graduate student at Princeton.  I’d just finished a degree in English literature, so when I started reading these nineteenth-century American texts I found them…well…weird.  Weird and wonderful and eccentric and difficult.  American literature does not quite come out of the same tradition as British literature.  It emerges from the sermon and from the political pamphlet, and hence tends to be at once quite political and euphoric.  Think of Leaves of Grass.  American writers, to me, all seemed to be so very unsure of themselves and what they were doing.  Hence these works, in the nineteenth century at least, can seem a bit all-over-the-place.  Think of Moby-Dick.  What is it, an adventure story  or a philosophical tract, or an encyclopedia of whaling?  It’s all of those things.  A former colleague once said to me: “You can find everything Dickens could do in the works of Melville, but the same is not true in reverse.”  This isn’t quite true.  Melville was never capable of the kind of multi-plotted novels like Dickens’s Bleak House.  But it’s mostly true, I think.  Melville’s work is so various, and so weird, and so formally eccentric at every point.  I value these qualities.

You’ve explored issues of race and class in much of your previous work–what do you think is unique in the American treatment of these topics?

You could argue that “race” is the great American subject.  So many writers have been concerned with racial difference and interaction, and this continues to be the case.  So I think that in American literature you get an amazing variety of literary approaches to this question.  Class is interesting because, at one level, it seems not to be an American subject at all.  The nation was meant to be an antidote to all that rigid class structure associated with Europe.  Of course it wasn’t, but ideas of class do get deflected in interesting ways, often merging with questions of race and ethnic difference.  It’s always problematic to argue for uniqueness, though I do think that the merging of class-based and racial themes in American literature is quite peculiar.  Think again of Moby-Dick.  It’s as much about the “horizontal” difference between cultures as it is about the “vertical” hierarchies of social power.

What is your favorite novel and why?

My favorite novel is Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo-Jumbo (1972).  It’s a bizarre, postmodernist novel, set in the 1920s, that attempts to offer a whole, revised history of western civilization!  I can’t think of another book that’s so short but attempts to contain so much, though Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 also comes to mind.

Which contemporary writer do you think has written a classic?

That’s a difficult question because there are so many amazing writers out there today: Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon… I’ve just been teaching Morrison’s Beloved–that’s certainly a classic in the way that it weaves together major tropes of the American literary tradition with a distinct African-American vernacular tradition.  It’s also a difficult book, both in its themes and its technique.  Difficulty often helps to make a classic!

How did you decide to become a writer?

I don’t remember it being a conscious decision. I was always a big reader, and a really nerdy kid—I had all sorts of imaginary friends and my mom says on camping trips I’d sit in my tent all day and write myself into whatever book I was reading. But I didn’t see writing as something I could actually do as a career—growing up, I didn’t know any writers and it felt to me like a pie-in-the-sky profession. I figured I’d sneak in time to write when I wasn’t working—when I was a kid I wanted to be a psychologist. It was in graduate school that I started trying to figure out a feasible way to make a life of it. The Stegner Fellowship has been more important to my fiction than anything else—it was the first time I felt comfortable calling myself a writer without using air quotes.

What literature has been important to you?

Grace Paley and James Baldwin have had, without a doubt, the biggest impact on me. When I started writing, I was really worried about seeming sappy or sentimental, so I wrote these very lean and tightly controlled stories, though it went against what came naturally to me. It was only when I read Paley and Baldwin that I saw how emotionally direct stories can be without seeming manipulative or corny. I get the feeling that every one of their stories is something they felt they needed to write, that they were more interested in being straightforward and honest than wowing the reader with their cleverness. They also write such character- and voice-driven stories while still giving us a grand sense of the larger events happening around them—the politics of their fiction extend so naturally from their characters that I never feel they’re forcing their opinions down my throat. Their stories can also be so angry, without ever resorting to meanness—they’re two of the most generous writers I’ve read. And they both write such gorgeous prose without ever being arty or flashy. I could go on and on. My other favorites are Knut Hamsun, Isaac Babel, Alice Munro, Bernard Malamud, William Trevor, Vasilly Aksyonov, Leonard Michaels, Ivan Bunin, Edward P. Jones, Raymond Carver, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Joan Didion, Nadine Gordimer, George Orwell, Chekhov and, like everybody else, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenna are probably the most important novels to me, along with American Pastoral and Housekeeping. I also like a lot of younger contemporary writers—Aleksander Hemon, Charles D’Ambrosio, Susan Choi, Chris Offutt, Sam Lipsyte and Dan Chaon, to name a few. And of course I was lucky enough to study with some of the best writers around while here at Stanford: Elizabeth Tallent, John L’Heureux, and Tobias Wolff.

How often do you write and what is your typical writing process?

I write on all the days I don’t teach. I write best in the mornings, before my day gets cluttered or stressful. My new plan is to turn off my phone and email—I’m horribly addicted to the Internet and can begin by researching one small (yet seemingly so necessary!) detail for a story and the next time I look up from my computer I realize I’ve just wasted three hours reading Gawker, or that I’ve gotten into a bidding war on eBay over vintage patio furniture, both of which I did this week.

I don’t have a special desk or a lucky pen or anything like that. If I can sit down and get something done, it doesn’t matter if I’m dressed or still in my pajamas, or have my music on or off. Sometimes I write in my apartment or in coffee shops nearby, and I’m also part of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, which is great—I share an office with a couple friends in a larger building of writers, and at lunch we all come out and eat together.

What issues do you struggle with in your own writing?

I have a hard time with middles. Before I start a story I usually have the opening scene, or at least the first paragraph, worked out in my mind, and soon after comes the ending. But middles have to achieve so much—they need to simultaneously sustain the tension I set up in the opening scene while raising the stakes, they need to be surprising and not make the reader feel like I’m dragging them directly toward an ending I refuse to budge on, even when it’s painfully obvious where the story is headed. That’s something I’m always wrestling with—I’m a stubborn writer and often fall in love with my endings, and once I’m actively writing toward them, my stories can lose steam or collapse altogether. I always tell my students to shoot through an entire first draft before revising so they don’t become married to phrases they’ll have to cut once the piece is done, and of all the advice I give in the classroom, this is the hardest to take for myself. It just feels so demoralizing to wake up and turn on my computer and try to make sense out of a pile of rubble—I need at least one solidly written section to tinker with just to get in the mode of writing, even if it doesn’t end up in the finished piece.

How has your writing changed since you began your career?

When I first started writing, I read the same stories over and over, trying to understand how they were put together. I didn’t know how to do anything, and certain writers—Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver and Lorrie Moore especially—served as models for everything from how to start a scene to how to use white space. Lately I’ve been finding that I trust my own instincts when starting stories, and though I know that has a lot to do with writing consistently over the past few years, I think it has more to do with having studied those stories for so long. And one of the amazing things about these writers is that when, for example, I teach Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” I still feel like the wind’s being knocked out of me every time I get to the moment where Robert puts his hand over the narrator’s and tells him to draw. I feel the same way when I teach Richard Ford’s “Communist”—I know I should see it coming, but it surprises me every time I get to the part where Glen Baxter shoots those geese.

Do you think it’s possible for an author to truly extract her own history and personality from the stories she creates?

That’s something I think about a lot. I’m almost finished with my story collection, and half of the narrators are men and some of the stories are set abroad or in the past. But no matter how different they are (and how different I tried to make them from each other), they all circle back to the same themes and are very obviously written by the same person. Grace Paley has this great quote, not to write what you know but to write what you don’t know about what you know. That’s what it feels like for me. I read a lot of nonfiction, and I love the feeling of trying to understand what it would have been like to live in another place or during a different time, or even to live here in the present day, but as a man, or a person much older than I am—I often find that I’m able to access certain emotional truths about my own life by not exploring things head-on. I don’t have any stories about young female writers living in San Francisco and teaching at Stanford, but I do feel that my collection accurately captures what I cared about, questioned and obsessed over during the time in my life I was writing it.

What do you think a short story can achieve that other forms of writing cannot?

Some might say a story can have a more fully developed narrative arc than a poem—but what about Philip Levine, whose poems are so character- and narrative-based? Others might say that while short stories can be novelistic in scope, their brevity demands that every word count—but what about poetically compressed novelists like Christine Schutt and Carole Maso? And then there are longer stories that I admire precisely because of the way the writers work with dead time and slower, more idle moments—I liked Jhumpa Lahiri’s newest collection of longer stories (Unaccustomed Earth) even more than her first because they felt so lived-in; the unhurried pacing of the stories made the endings even more shocking and resonant for me.

What advice would you give to undergraduates who have studied creative writing, but don’t know how to carry that interest into life after college?

Move somewhere cheap where you have time not only to write but to read. After college I lived in expensive places (Bay Area, Tel Aviv, New York), and was always piling on job after job to pay rent—I wouldn’t use my computer to write, I’d use it to search Craigslist for jobs. Before the Stegner I was living in Brooklyn and working three, sometimes four, jobs at a time. I was barely writing at all, though it was what I wanted to do most. It was a fun time, but also unnecessarily anxious and frustrating. I never really got the starving artist thing—what’s so romantic about it if you don’t have any time to make art?

And once you’re in that cheap place, find other people who like to talk about books, and a few who are interested in swapping work. But be careful about choosing your readers, especially with new writing—I heard Philip Roth talk once and he said something that really stuck with me: never let anybody read your early drafts if they aren’t on your side.

What was the idea behind the original Sea of Cortez expedition?

As they say themselves, on the surface it was justifiable as a traditional scientific mission with a set of specific aims. But in reality, they both wanted to leave behind some major distractions and personal crises in Monterey and to escape into the joy of exploring something entirely new – to see all that their eyes could accommodate, as they put it. They loved the word ALL.

What sorts of discoveries have resulted from your following in Steinbeck’s footsteps?

There are scientific ‘discoveries’ or new results, and there are personal realizations. The former are written up in peer-reviewed journals and lead to additional work by you or others. The latter can change the way you think about everything. Usually in retrospect, such things seem obvious, perhaps bordering on trivial. But sometimes they need to be freed from the unconscious before we ‘realize’ them.
For example, it was naïve to expect to go back to all the sites visited by Steinbeck and Ricketts more than 60 years later and be able to make sense of all that has changed– even if we could identify all that has changed. What really is necessary to see change is to examine something over and over again at close time intervals, so ongoing variation doesn’t obscure long-term change. The global warming controversy is teaching us this very well. But sometimes you just need a more visceral example.
Another example that hit home during the trip was the realization that by following the path of Steinbeck and Ricketts – visiting the same places at the same time of year, etc – that we were putting blinders on our own eyes, and preventing them from discovering what was really out there. This epiphany came after we were done with our intertidal work and had embarked on a week of squid studies out of sight of the shoreline. We were in the middle of the Gulf, in a dense fog bank caused by an upwelling event, when we found the first tiny larvae of Humboldt squid ever described in this area, thereby demonstrating that spawning was taking place. But this scientific finding (which we later published) did not resonate like the realization that it took leaving the path of Steinbeck and Ricketts for us to find the sense of discovery that they must have experienced. This is real discovery and it changes you.

Do you feel that the holistic, interdisciplinary approach that Ricketts and Steinbeck took in The Log from the Sea of Cortez still has relevance to today’s scientists?

Absolutely YES. Ricketts and Steinbeck both told us how everything in nature is connected to everything else, that man is part of nature, and that even the most familiar things should be periodically examined from a variety of angles under a jeweler’s loupe. The big issues in ecological sciences today involving climate change, health of the oceans, rising human populations, shortages of fresh water (and the list goes on and on) are all extremely complex issues that will never be understood (let alone ‘solved’) from a single perspective. We need to not only bring collaborators from different disciplines together but to also develop a fundamentally more holistic way of thinking by these collaborators. How do you do this? By reading the poetry of Robinson Jeffers in conjunction with a geology class? There are many ways, but bridging the gap between science and humanities is essential.

Why do you think it’s traditionally been easier for writers to poeticize fieldwork than labwork?

Probably fieldwork is naturally more appealing to most people, and it may lend itself more readily to an adventure-type story. In some cases (including my own – electrophysiology), there is a difficult language problem that needs to be resolved. But this is not impossible, even for fields that are far removed from the backgrounds of most people. There are some extremely compelling, beautiful and philosophically deep tales of lab and theoretical work – Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing the Universe and Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory come to mind.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, godfather of modern neurobiology, once wrote that a major “disease of the will” for scientists is bibliophilia, and the desire to be “cultured.” Do you think that the works of Steinbeck or other literary authors can have a positive effect on the modern scientist?

Of course they can – and any scientist that dismisses what the humanities have to teach us is probably a charlatan. Faulkner’s novella The Bear is a great story of both personal and ecological awareness – the two cannot be separated. These works show us the way of putting science into a humanistic perspective. And of course there is Moby Dick. Students of science should read these works not to be cultured, but to be human.

Conversely, how has your scientific background, both as a neurobiologist and ecologist, affected your own reading of Steinbeck? Are there aspects of his work that you think are best appreciated with some biological knowledge?

I suspect that Log from the Sea of Cortez is more appreciated by those with a bit of biological knowledge, but it is written in a way that does not demand it. It teaches you the biology as you go along with the voyage. Perhaps that is what really appeals to me, because it also has defined the journey that brought me to this interview. As an electrical engineering student going into physiology in graduate school, I was scared. I had essentially no formal biological background other than 9th grade biology, which as far as I can recall was entirely devoted to dissections. I had far more background in electronic instrumentation, but even that was more from a long-time interest in ham radio than courses in college. But biology, like any science, is about seeing the familiar, asking new questions and finding unexpected answers. That is the primary joy of discovery. Background is just that, and it will grow on its own as you continue the voyage.

What motivated you to teach a course about narrative and the environment?

Zombies motivated me. The idea for a class started when I was having a beer with Miles Traer, a GES Masters student who’s been crucial to the development of this course. We talked about the apocalyptic rhetoric people use to describe global warming, and we immediately got onto a tangent about our favorite apocalyptic movies and books. Miles and I thought it would be fun to survey some apocalyptic stories as a way to envision the global warming worst case scenario. Not all apocalypses are the same, though, and the best stories conclude with images of a world that you recognize in today’s world: empty skyscrapers, grass growing in the streets, rivers of blackness, bones scattered in the desert, drowned cities. We recognize these elements in our everyday lives; these are environmental stories with the Earth as a main character.
The more Miles and I thought about it, the more the class became about science communication. In general, scientists have a reputation for being bad communicators. I’ve found that when any given conversation is running dry, I can always start a conversation about pop culture. So I thought, Why not apply the same idea to science communication? This is a humanities style class masquerading as a science class, using fiction to invite earth scientists to think creatively.

In the course description, you write “the course takes an experimental approach to the challenge of science communication.” What are your hypotheses and some of your intended methods for this “experiment”?

That’s funny, I hadn’t thought of it that way when I was writing the course description. I guess I’m testing a premise I have that Earth scientists have unique imaginations, because they have to think about how the Earth acts on a spectrum of time and space scales. It takes a while to get your head around the idea of geologic time, so that when an earth scientist talks about something that happened 1.2 billion or 350 million or 20 thousand or 300 years ago the numbers actually mean something. Those kind of numbers just sound big to most non-scientists. The same thing goes for space. Earth scientists deal with phenomena in nature on scales ranging from the molecular to planetary, and everything in between. Getting comfortable with this spectrum of space and time is a humbling experience that challenges the imagination. So I guess my hypothesis is that this imaginative quality we’ve had to learn can be funneled into great storytelling when given the right opportunity and attention.
As for methods, I’d think the first thing to do is to get the creative juices flowing. I want to blend creative writing with science, and call it something other than science fiction. More like science non-fiction, though that sounds kind of corny. This class will probably be a ‘spaghetti at the wall’ kind of approach where we’ll try a bunch of things out and see what sticks.

What major environmental issues have been effectively popularized by story and narrative, and what elements of those stories do you think made them successful?

I’m mixed about An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore did a great thing in bringing the issue to the forefront, but there are moments in the movie that feel like a prolonged political ad. At the same time, I think that the global warming story is really tough to tell, because the problems are complex, the consequences are uncertain, and the impacts are so different from place to place.
The problem with most environmental stories is that there is often a lack of human interaction, and therefore a lack of character. Let’s say you want to tell a story about destruction of coral reef ecosystems. The setting is fantastic, there’s tension and a sense of threat, but what you’re missing is a protagonist. The tendency is to anthropomorphize, but that risks coming off like a hippie tree-hugger. My point is that environmental value is not innate to an environment- it arises from human interaction with an environment.

What has been your experience in translating your own technical, scientific research for a non-scientific, popular audience? What are the particular challenges you face?

Scientific jargon is probably the biggest problem. One thing that happens when you’re immersed in science is that you get used to the terminology of your field, and you forget that most people don’t use these words in their everyday conversations. People are usually hesitant to speak up and say they don’t know the meaning of something, so you have to rely on your ability to read your audience and anticipate what they will and will not know. You have to be conscious about language to be a good communicator. But if you’re passionate about what you study and you want people to understand it, eventually you will figure out a way to explain yourself.

Much of the discussion about communicating environmental issues revolves around instigating change—campaigning for policy responses to global climate change, raising awareness about unsustainable agricultural practices, reducing industrial waste, etc. Is there such thing as apolitical environmental writing and film?

Most people have some connection with nature that is very personal, and I think we all grapple with the significance of those connections regardless of political inclinations. It seems inevitable that when you paint of picture of an environment there is an implication that you want to conserve and preserve that place, but I’d like to think that there are apolitical writings and films that only serve to explore our relationship to the environment without necessarily advocating a behavioral change.

What civic responsibility do you think a researcher has (or doesn’t have) to communicate his/her findings to a non-scientific audience?

For me, there’s no point in pursuing knowledge for its own sake—it has to inform our lives and our decisions. Over the past 20 years there’s been a movement to have more outspoken scientists, and I think this is a good thing. Speaking out, however, can be dangerous, because you risk the integrity and objectivity of your science. You have to remain unbiased if you want to be a good researcher. That said, it’s crucial for important information to be disseminated to the public, if for no other reason than to maintain trust in scientific expertise. It’s also important to get beyond some of the stereotypes people have about scientists, and this only comes through with more exposure.

How did you decide to become a poet?
I can’t remember a point when I decided to become a poet; I just decided to spend lots of time writing poetry, because I loved poems and I loved working with language. In the fall of 1999, I’d been out of graduate school for five years working full-time as a writer of manuals that explained how to use business software. It wasn’t the worst job, but I wanted to pursue my own writing, as an end in itself, without thinking about whether I was becoming a poet. I reduced my hours to part-time, and for the next six years, until I came to Stanford in 2005, I worked three days a week writing software manuals and four days a week writing and translating poetry. It was a great arrangement— enough money to live in an expensive city (San Francisco), and plenty of time to write. In 2005 I was fortunate enough to receive a Wallace Stegner fellowship and I haven’t written a nice word about computers ever since.

How often do you write and how do you motivate yourself?
I write frequently, though not every day. When I don’t have other responsibilities, I like to write for 3-4 hours in the morning. I think best in the morning and almost never write at night. Motivation is easy, and, in some ways, I was helped by years of working in Silicon Valley, when I really didn’t have a choice about whether I got up and sat a desk working all day. If I don’t feel like writing, I read the poetry of other writers until I sense a spark and can begin my own poem. Or, I’ll re-read my old drafts, looking for ways to revise.

How does teaching interact with your own poetry?
It often occurs to me when I’m writing that I’d better walk the talk. So when I tell students to cut the abstraction, write with vivid imagery, and revise to the heart of the poem, I’d better do it myself. Teaching helps me clarify what I value in poetry, which then leads back into my own efforts.

What poems are or have been important to you?
Different poems and poets have been important to me at different times. When I was an undergraduate, I loved the poems by Joy Harjo in her books She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War, poems like “New Orleans” and “Santa Fe.” She was the first poet I ever heard read when I was a freshman at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I’d lived in the Southwest most of my life, and it was important for me to hear about its history and landscape from the perspective of this Native American poet. “Yellow Glove” by Naomi Shihab Nye was a favorite—I’ve always liked poems about childhood, it’s an inexhaustible subject. “Under Stars” by Tess Gallagher was one of the first poems I ever memorized. Recently, an important poem to me that I frequently re-read is “Paean to Place” by Lorine Niedecker. It’s an autobiographical poem about her childhood in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.

As you look back over older work, what changes do you notice in your poetry?
I hope that my poems have become more tightly crafted, and, as a result, more urgent. I’m a stickler for removing unnecessary articles, adjectives, and prepositional phrases that tend to slow down a poem. I like my poems to have rhythmic cadence, force and motion. I have a clearer sense than I used to of trying to make each line of poetry a good line and not just a few words that get me from point A to point B.

What is a typical writing process for you, from idea to completion?
My poems generally don’t come from preconceived ideas. A line or a phrase simply comes to mind, from observation or memory or thinking, and I go from there. When it’s going well, when I’m feeling a lot of energy behind the start of a poem, I like to work on it as much as I can while the emotion is new. However, I’m rarely able to finish a poem in a short period of time. After the initial drafts, I’ll return to a poem periodically over a long time, often years, making improvements or eventually deciding enough’s enough.

How can a writer know when a given poem they have created is “finished”?
This is a tough one. Can I say, “Next question!”? I work on my poems for a long time. It’s hard to know when a poem is done—sometimes you just can’t figure out how to make it better, or else you choose to put your energy toward poems that seem more promising. When a poem is “finished” does that mean it’s “perfect”? Probably not. My best advice is to keep starting new poems— your best work is ahead of you, and spend lots and lots of time revising your old poems, taking them to the next level as best you can.

What do you think is the role of an editor for a poet? Is it possible to self-edit or is it important to get another person’s perspective?
Very few poets have professional editors, in the way that prose writers have editors. But, poets do have friends and peers and readers who they trust. There are some poets, I imagine, who can work without feedback, but I’ve always found that smart readers are very important to helping me improve my work. They call me on my indulgences, on places where the poem becomes too private or where it lacks clarity or energy. You’d probably be amazed at how much published work out there has at least some element of collaboration behind it. Most poets don’t go at it wholly alone.

How do you think a student with a technical major can benefit from participating in a creative writing workshop?
“Poetry should be made by all,” said the French poet Lautreamont. I don’t think there’s any special benefit for technical majors in taking poetry classes. Poetry, like literature of any kind, or the arts, is just one of the good things in life. Everyone has something to say about their lives and the world they find around them. There’s poetry out there for everyone. I love it when students with a technical background bring their perspective to my writing classes— their attention to detail makes them some of the best poets.

What do you think a poem can do that other forms of writing cannot do?
That’s another tough question, and I can think of counter-arguments to any ideas that I propose. In general, poetry is more compressed that prose, less focused on story. But, there are plenty of poets who are wordier than Hemingway, and compression is a big part of micro-fiction and the short story. Also, poems can tell stories just like prose. If anything, poetry is able to more quickly shift gears and follow other ways of thinking and moving in the world than prose. Poetry strikes me as more provisional, more apt to contradict itself for the right music and not apologize about it. In a poem, you can write what you think and observe without any intermediary other than your own language.

Enrique Chagoya is a professor of Art at Stanford University. His work ranges many media, and is currently in the collections of the country’s most major museums. The exhibition “Borderlandia” which surveys his work of the past twenty five years will be visiting the Berkeley Art Museum from February 13 – May 18, 2008.

Leland Quarterly: I was hoping you would start by describing your childhood and how you first began your artistic pursuits?

Enrique Chagoya: Yes well, I grew up in Mexico City throughout the late fifties and early sixties. During these years, my father was definitely the greatest influence on me. He gave me my first paint set and my first art lessons when I was seven years old. He studied art quite a bit, but he never made it as an artist, though I think that’s what he would have wanted—he ended up working at the Central Bank in Mexico. It allowed him to pay the bills, to feed us—we had a large family—and to send us to school. But he would paint at night, landscape paintings and some architectural drawings; I wanted to do the same as a little kid but I don’t think my father wanted to encourage my artistic instincts too much because he saw no future in it. It was only because I was so persistent in bothering him that he decided to teach me. He had no choice, I was in love with art, and I knew I was in love with art, even before I was old enough to know anything about what that meant.

LQ: What art was it that inspired you besides your father’s work?

EC: Primarily cartoons and comics actually; some Mexican ones and the famous American ones like Batman and Superman. I began to make comics and I also sold my old comic books at my home door; it allowed me to get new comics. I also liked to get the forbidden “underground” comics; occasionally they could be found in the record sleeves of risqué American vinyls like Janis Joplin. Some of my friends in elementary school and high school shared the same interest, so often we would make caricatures of each other and our teachers—it got me into trouble more than once, I can tell you that. But we would spend most of our free time drawing and painting, or at least I would; it was never a chore, always something that I reveled in and waited for when I wasn’t making art.

LQ: Nevertheless though, you chose not to pursue art during college?

EC: Well not immediately. Yes, that’s true… During my undergraduate years I studied an array of subjects—anthropology, sociology, history. I finally settled on political science and economics. I was offered a job before the end of my last year; I went to work as an economist in the countryside. Not strictly an economist in the American sense of the word, it was social work. The rural class was extremely poor and I was involved in a program to help bolster their incomes. The world and capitalism was speeding forward and they were being left behind, so I tried to facilitate the development of low income business cooperatives.

LQ: But you stopped that work in order to come to the San Francisco Art Institute. What kind of a change was this for you?

EC: Yes, that’s right. It was an enormous change. I felt a huge sense of guilt at the beginning. My wife at the time, an American sociologist, didn’t want me to go to art school; I’d met her in Mexico, and she was doing the same kind of work that I was in the countryside—so when I mentioned the idea she was not very encouraging. In Mexico she had gotten very sick, because we’d been living in such harsh conditions in the villages in which we worked. She contracted a parasite that nearly killed her. So moving was less the issue, we had to for her health, but my choice to switch careers only happened after we got to California—I think she thought it was selfish of me, or that I’d stopped caring. And to be honest there was a part of me that agreed with her. I couldn’t help feeling the whole thing was somehow frivolous. But the schools of economics in the Bay Area were not as exciting to me nor the kind of work that would be available to me after graduating from them, so I decided to take chances and change course. It wasn’t an easy decision. It was the beginning of the end of my marriage for one thing. However, for me it was the right choice, I do not regret it, not at all. I am a better artist than the economist I could have been.

LQ: When you say you that you realized how difficult it is to effect real change, is it that sentiment that catalyzed a shift in your work towards content which was socially and politically motivated?

EC: Actually, I think 1971 really caused that shift. I was taking part in a demonstration with other students from my university in Mexico; we wanted changes in the curriculum, and we were contesting a set of new fees the university had recently put forward. Our protests happened to coalesce with the electric workers’ strike and it turned into a kind of social outpouring… something much bigger than we expected. The army came to quell the disturbance, and I remember being chased by paramilitaries dressed in civilian clothes, armed with bamboo sticks that had long blades at the ends, and hand guns. About seventy people were killed… It was a real massacre. That’s the first time I can remember feeling that I could die for my ideas… and it changed my understanding of society, my artistic ideas as well.

LQ: So you came to the San Francisco Art Institute with political and social motivations?

EC: Yes and no. One of the earliest series at the SF Art Institute was for a group of Salvadorian poets who were touring the country protesting the invasion of Central America by the Reagan Administration, and I made a couple of drawings for their show. The greatest reward of the experience was that I would not be killed, I would not even be threatened, for my ideas—art was a kind of exorcism for me, an excavation of the anxiety that had formed inside of me during my time in Mexico about the state of the world and my powerlessness to change it all. So it wasn’t with a sense of empowerment that I took to my graduate education in art. I was in need of a therapeutic outlet; it takes a very tough spirit to do social work—to not become overwhelmed by the grandness and intricacy of the world, the underlying sensation that one is barely, if at all, significant. So while my work was politically and socially motivated in terms of the content, I was really making art for myself… exercising my freedom of expression. Occasionally I feel a bit guilty about the self-indulgence of it, but I think we must be self-indulgent in exercising our rights, our political and social voice. And I welcome others to be self-indulgent in that regard as well. Vive la difference!

LQ: How did these feelings manifest themselves in your work?

EC: Well very early on the notion of words and language was under attack in my work, because I’d become so suspicious of rhetoric in my youth and even more so upon arriving in America. Words like justice, equality etc. when spoken by politicians, in any country, more often than not conceal manifestations of their opposites; and the greater the injustice in a country the more fervently these buzz words are used. The words freedom or democracy, for instance, may mean something different for, ancient Greeks, for the forefathers of this country who owned slaves, for Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela, or in the statements of George W. Bush. The same word may have different meanings in different times and places. I always had a feeling of how ambiguous words are and consequently I felt the need to address the falsity of language, and satirize it. I think the very visual mural-based art of the pre-Columbian books by the Mayans and the Aztecs were a great influence on me; if we look at the art of these cultures we can appreciate how they invested visual representation with exact meanings; its so easy to forget how insufficient words often are for describing the world around us; I think my art, though socially and politically critical, also seeks to remind people of this more basic fact.

LQ: And what did you do after leaving the SF Art Institute?

EC: First I went to the San Francisco country jail to teach art to prisoners for about three years. They were mainly low crime criminals; but they weren’t really criminals for me, they were just students. The experience made me realize, and would make anyone realize, that these people were sufferers of poor circumstance. They’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time; and it was extremely sad to see, because so many of them were smart, or talented, but they had more opportunities to go to jail than to go to school, falling into a cycle they couldn’t lift themselves out of. To see their hunger for education and the arts awakened me to the short distance between normal citizens and those that have slid to the margins, the collateral damage of a society’s structure, those for whom it doesn’t work out… we often believe they are to blame; but eighty or ninety percent of those who take any educational classes while in jail do not return (except for those with life sentences, or in death row). Many learn how to make an honest living thanks to the classes they take while in prison: gardening, art, creative writing, drama, computer programming, etc. Given the opportunity to learn from an interested teacher they really revel in it—ever since I’ve felt we need fewer prisons and more schools; but I think its going in the opposite direction.

LQ: And after working at the prison?

EC: After leaving the jail, I was offered the curatorship at the Galeria de la Raza, a Chicano gallery. And actually for my first show I displayed only work of inmates that I had taught. I negotiated with the jail to have the prisoners come over for the opening, accompanied by the sheriff of course… but nonetheless, they were overwhelmed to see their own work hanging in a real gallery and appreciated by people outside of prison; it was very rewarding for them, and for me. It was a great way to start, because it instilled in me a sense of always wanting to work with specific communities in my exhibitions; The Galeria de la Raza had a history of community oriented shows like the one on apartheid in South Africa right before I started. I did other shows like Puerto Rican political prisoner’s art , and organized an enormous and ever-growing annual Day of the Dead exhibition in the Mission, things like that. But I had also started to teach at UC Berkeley, and my job as a curator became overwhelmingly busy very fast. I decided to leave the Galeria de la Raza, after three years, just after starting the plans for a large Day of the Dead exhibition at the Smithsonian, which would have been a really major and wonderful exhibition—that was my only regret about leaving those years of work as a curator. Other than that show, I was thrilled to be done with it. So I left to teach full time at Berkeley in 1990, and it was soon after that that Cal State offered me a tenured track position; that gave much more time to make my art, and solidified my future in education.

LQ: And how did you get to Stanford?

EC: Well I was at Cal State for five years, and I truly loved it there; my students were amazing and wonderful people, my schedule wasn’t too burdensome, and I could support myself comfortably; so I was totally happy there and never even thought of leaving. But then I received a call from David Hannah in the art department here asking me to try out for the tenured track position. I turned the invitation down immediately, that’s how uninterested I was in moving and how much I loved Cal State. But then I said to myself, “maybe I should have asked what they were offering at the least.” [chuckle] So I called back a week later, I figured I might as well see if I’d get the job and then make a decision. Sure enough I became a finalist and got the position, even though deep down throughout the process I was thinking how relieving it would be not to get the job, and not to have to face my students and colleagues at Cal State that I’d grown so close with. What clinched it was the studio space Stanford offered, I couldn’t afford anything like it in the bay Area and their offer was just hard to refuse… So, when I got the job offer I left Cal State with a little bit of a heavy heart, but everyone there understood and supported me, and I managed to keep in touch with them.

LQ: Around that time your work began to undergo a somewhat meteoric rise in the commercial art world and the museum world. When was your first watershed exhibition?

EC: That was in 1989 in New York City, it was a solo exhibition at the Alternative Museum. And the experience of showing in New York at that time was so amazing. My reception there was astounding to me because I never expected to become a “popular” artist, only an underground artist or alternative artist. So when my work started to be purchased by the Metropolitan, Moma, the Whitney, I realized I’d been a bit too reticent in my expectations. But I think that was always a good thing for, I was never working in order to become successful. You know the Taoist maxim: if you want something you should not want it or the less you look for something the more it comes to you. I think that’s sort of how things have happened to me.

LQ: And now you are having a twenty five year survey at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa…

EC: Yeah, to have my first major survey in the heart of the country is ironic and great; because I really first got notoriety in New York City and then in the Bay Area and have mainly been popular in those places. So to have it hosted in a state that’s perhaps more symbolic of middle America is a fantastic for me—as someone who has always felt torn between to cultures and two countries—I feel exceptionally grateful.

LQ: And what would be your advice for young artists out there who are experiencing doubts about pursuing what is often a very precarious future as an artist?

EC: I would say trust yourself. Trust yourself. It’s easy to say, but often it’s the hardest thing to do, and the biggest obstacle in our way. But if you are brave enough to trust yourself, and chose work that you love, you will get very good at it, and the rest tends to work itself out.

Download “In Conversation with Enrique Chagoya” as a PDF.

“The aim is to find a form of speech that touches the common denominator. Find poems that speak deeply and then animate them clearly for the common reader. I’m trying to hammer every bit of pretense out of my writing, make it sharp and intense.”

LELAND QUARTERLY: Okay, to start: in your article for the American Poetry Review, you call Romantic John Clare’s attitude toward nature “a unique, witnessing energy.” Is there something about the poetic disposition that might change people’s attitudes toward the environment, and if so, how?

JOHN FELSTINER: Oh, we’re going to start like that. You don’t want to know where I’m from?

LQ: Well, we could start that way, but we kind of figured that we would just dive right in. Do you want us to go back?

JF: No, no, it’s fine. Is there something about the poetic disposition…?

LQ: Right. Is there something about the poetic disposition that might change people’s attitudes toward the environment, and if so, how?

JF: Well, it sounds like you’re asking why even address the question through the lens of poetry when there are so many other avenues that seem to be more to the point—natural history, science, economics, politics, law? All of these seem much closer to our needs, environmentally speaking. Why go back to what so many people consider frosting on the cake, even self-indulgence?
Personally, I believe that all those approaches are absolutely necessary, but without a human acknowledgment of the crisis and the need at the core of it, these efforts are not going to go anywhere except in reaction to a tsunami or worse. Tsunamis, hurricanes, massive shortages have an immediate impact, but the memory of things that seem to jump in your face and say ‘Pay attention to global warming’ is minimal. It can peter out in a matter of months sometimes.
Ezra Pound said: “Poetry is news that stays news.” Actually, he said literature is news that stays news, but I’ll take the opportunity to change that a bit. Poetry—poetry is news that stays news. To make news stay fresh on our agenda, we need a thrust to the gut, the fiber, the grain of what makes us work. More than ever, I believe poetry can do this for people. This hope drives the book I’ve just finished.
Let me make an aside, if I may.

LQ: Absolutely.

JF: This quarter I’m teaching a course called “Imagining the Holocaust.” It used to be “Literature of the Holocaust.” I don’t believe we can grasp what happened back then except through acts of imagination. Imagination’s no substitute for the real thing, but short of actuality, all we have is imagination—psychic actuality, which may yield an even sharper sense than having been there.
In this course I deal with “creative resistance”: poetry, art, photography, music that emerged in Nazi-occupied Europe. In those conditions poetry occurred for its terseness and coherence. We need to touch people at the core as well as laying out fatal statistics.
And I think we have to start with the 11th grade. College is often too late. Many college students come with a pre-professional aim, but in about 11th grade people are beginning to think what they might devote their lives to. Call it an almost galvanic shock of realizing what can and should be done with one’s life. The recognitions poems can incite may trigger such realization.
Now, for some folks, the environmental cause remains external—an abstract question of natural surroundings, of wilderness. But what matters is the connection, the interaction between humankind and what lives around us. We nearly extinguished the Californian condor, but at the last minute began to bring it back. Because our stance toward non-human nature will make all the difference, we must move through the human element, the human dimension and perspective. Poetry is always opening up and unblocking new perspectives for us.
Are you familiar with the William Carlos Williams poem: “To Waken an Old Lady?”

LQ: Yes, we are.

JF: Then you know the phrase: “But what?”
It marks a fresh recognition. The same thing happens in Shirley Kaufman’s “Jacaranda” or in Williams’s “Spring and All.”
“Rooted, they…”—what?
The line itself grips down; it’s taught a whole generation of poets: “rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken.” Just the crisped energy in that “stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf,” new growth taking form, has bred a whole strain of possibility in modern poetry.
My book is called So Much Depends: Poetry and Environmental Urgency. As Williams would have it, so much depends on seeing things afresh and saying them anew: seeing by saying, and saying by seeing. So much depends upon getting a grasp on the natural world that does not smother it. And “so much depends” is an open-ended phrase. We’re not told how much or what. We are beginning to learn what is needed and how very much.
This may not be the crucial question for my children, perhaps not even for yours, but it is a question for the generation that’s coming very soon.

LQ: I’m interested in how the implementation of this perspective might be carried out. It takes a pretty dedicated teacher, and a pretty personal connection to make you get into something on your own.

JF: That’s very true. I would have to respond with Coleridge’s word “Joy.” Give people joy and they’ll go with you. If you just scare them or hector, they won’t. Catch them where they live—somewhere more than in the mind—I would call it spirit. The spirit—the inner energy we feel when we’re most ourselves and most pointedly engaged. Catch people there, you’ll enlist them in some way.
I try to do this via poetry. The honest answer is, I’m not a scientist, a natural historian, an outright activist, a nature writer, a policy maker, or a lawyer. I’ve decided to do what I do best, for the time being. What’s more, I’ve gotten more energy out of this task than from anything else, with more socio-political urgency.
The aim is to find a form of speech that touches the common denominator. Find poems that speak deeply and then animate them clearly for the common reader. I’m trying to hammer every bit of pretense out of my writing, make it sharp and intense.
Trying to work out this perspective has given me a great deal of pleasure, and American Poetry Review has been a godsend. Publishing columns throughout 2007 has allowed me to choose six poets I thought would be most striking and accessible: Williams, Clare, Dickinson, Millay, Swenson, Haines. Meanwhile, I’ve become more and more taken by finding images to accompany my essays. APR is publishing more graphics than they ever have, among them an unknown shot of Robinson Jeffers and Edna St. Vincent Millay at Hawk Tower in 1930, also Millay protesting against the Sacco and Vanzetti murders.

LQ: It’s interesting that you mentioned Robinson Jeffers. I was recently reading a book of Jeffers poetry, and the introduction touched on something I’m interested in. They were discussing Jeffers’ style, and were opposing it to the experimentalists, who they claim did not have the “spiritual nerve” that Jeffers did. I’m interested in the attitude that comes from such a statement because it seems that experimental and more “traditional” poetry seem to polarize people. Do you think these two approaches to poetry are actually opposed or that they are just two different ways of getting at the same thing?

JF: Of course, there’s also a question of what “experimental” signifies. To say it’s something that blasts beyond the tradition is one thing. But Frost was experimental in trying to wrestle colloquial sound and sense together in his voice, and on the page. Williams was experimental, but so good at it he may not seem experimental now. Everything is relative to what has come before.
Really, I don’t fully credit that distinction. Certainly Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Lowell, T.S. Eliot—all of these were experimenting in some way. What made Jeffers experimental was his impulse toward “inhumanism”—the extreme this carried him to. His so-called misanthropy: the idea that humankind was a botched experiment and that we could just let the vultures take over. In one poem, he’d wish to be eaten by a vulture and end up as mulch.
Jeffers, for me, turned out to be one of the epicenters of my book. A phrase of his became very famous in 1965, in the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in a Sierra Club book called Not Man Apart, put together with Ansel Adams photography and Robinson Jeffers poetry. Praising “Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,” Jeffers then says: “Love that, not man / Apart from that”—a loaded line break!
Jeffers was saying we ought not to worship man as distinct from the natural world. The Sierra Club book title misquotes him by leaving out the line break in Jeffers’s phrase.
Two other key poems occur in my book. William Stafford’s “The Well Rising” ends, “I place my feet / With care in such a world.” It’s akin to the Native American spirit. And George Oppen’s “Psalm” ends on “this in which the wild deer / Startle and stare out.” This marvelous poem leaves off where I want my book to leave us. Will the deer bolt in panic or go on feeding? A wildness in our world has carried on for millions of years: Will we continue to live with that and let it live?

LQ: Our last question moves in a slightly different direction. I’ve always been attracted to German poetry, much more so than English poetry. Paul Celan was one of the main poets that struck my interest, and it is frustrating for me because I feel that I am not really getting the poetry directly. It is like a treasure chest that I am not able to unlock, so I am studying German in order to read the poetry in the original language. My question, though, is whether or not there is a fundamental difference between German and English poetry.

JF: There are easier ways to make your way into the German language, but I don’t know if there are better ways. Poetry in another language, such as German, may even constitute a different thing—not just in another language with different overtones, but a different gestalt, a different grasp of things.
Two of the people who first cottoned to my book Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, were Eavan Boland and Tobias Wolff. That Celan should matter to them was so heartening back in 1995 when the book came out. But even before then and since, I have become aware of many poets and writers to whom Celan offered a touchstone, if not the touchstone, for seriousness and absolute honesty in poetry.
Take Jorie Graham. She writes so differently from Paul Celan—her voicings, line lengths, figures, much else. I could add John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, Heather McHugh, Geoffrey Hill, Sharon Olds, Edward Hirsch, Rita Dove, Bob Hass, on and on. This trust in him must have something to do with historical awareness, Celan’s utter dependence on purging German language, his fierce introspection. He’s a touchstone for honesty and seriousness. So, whatever inevitable differences exist, there must be a fundamental kinship between this German poetry and some English/American poetry.
Back in the mid-1970’s, I’d just come back from a year teaching in Israel, from meeting poets of all kinds, some of whom knew Celan. I came back and read a review of a recent book of Celan poems in English and thought: I can’t pass above or around this—I’ve got to go through it. It was a forced option. If I’d known it was going to be seventeen years before I came out with a book, I hope I would not have hesitated. This was poetry of such challenged, challenging intensity. Furthermore, I believe that to get to the heart of it, translation was the only way. Not from outside, but inside.
Now, as it happened, when I began writing on Celan I had no deadline. That was both good and bad. I didn’t hurry, but it did take seventeen years. Now I look back at a road not taken. I can’t imagine who I would have become without encountering Celan, can’t imagine not having lived through that experience and having learned what I did.
Funnily enough, people who take my IHUM course and come back to me later often remember only the St. Lawrence String Quartet, or my giving a banshee cry to demonstrate Yeats’s belief system. But a few more students now are coming back and saying they remember Paul Celan.
If there is anything Johnny Appleseed-like about me, aside from environmental awareness and urgency, it’s the necessity of Paul Celan’s poetry.

Download “Not Man | Apart” as a PDF.