ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

Chris Glomski 

General Questions

Where were you born?  Where did you grow up?  What was your formation?

I was born in Pueblo, Colorado.  My father was stationed in the army.  My parents, both from Chicago, moved back here when I was two or three years old.  One of my earliest memories is of gas igniting in a space heater in Berwyn where they rented.  A couple years later, they bought a house in Elk Grove Village, the northwest suburb where I and my brothers and sisters grew up.  I went to Catholic schools for grades 1 through 12.

My last two years in high school, I studied English with an eccentric graduate of the University of Chicago who was also a Viatorian brother.  At sixteen, I was reading things like the Second Shepherd’s Play and Paradise Lost.  I remember liking these works despite my limited understanding of them—and that was a first for me in school.  Toward the end of high school we ventured into modernism.  Hopkins.  Eliot and Pound, some Auden, Stevens, and Williams.

What are your poetic influences?

Music, I think, was my first influence.  As a child, virtually all kinds, but increasingly in my teens, I gravitated to the rock-pop-soul bins.  Then discovered new wave.  Then punk and post-punk.  I’m still very attracted to the start of the seventies: the Stones, Stooges, David Bowie, Big Star, and what followed.  I’ve always liked to sing, but was shy about it until I joined a band in my early thirties—already over-the-hill in rock time!  So initially, the solitary nature of writing influenced me to regard it as a potential source of expression.

Early in college I started reading contemporary poets on my own, feeling reassured by the fact that they weren’t all dead.  I liked that in Russell Edson or James Tate a poet could be overtly funny.  In Simic, I liked that you could be overtly strange, and have that be the point of the poem—this seemed to me different from most poetry I had read in school.

Maybe something about the idea of living writers made the prospect of writing less remote.  My sophomore year at college, I took a course called In print / In person.  We read books by living authors, and after we finished a book, that author came to the class.  Author availability clearly brought about some strange juxtapositions:  Tobias Wolff followed David Morell, who wrote the Rambo books.  I remember Charles Wright showing up in a jacket and tie, looking very business-like, to take our questions about The Other Side of the River.

There was a certain grad student in the class who often framed his comments in terms of what “Ashbery was doing,” though we weren’t reading anyone by that name for the course.  So I picked up Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.  My first impression was “this is baffling.”  I wasn’t instantly getting it, and felt sheepish each time I looked at it.  I read it off-and-on for about a year.  Finally, the ending of one of the poems took hold of me in that it sounded slightly nonsensical, yet also like an echo of something unbelievably central to the way we use language—I was floored.  It seemed to happen all at once, but it’s more probable that I had been teaching myself to read him over that year.  Eventually, all the New York poets became important to me, but none more so than Schuyler.

Other influences would be Williams’ Kora in Hell, Rimbaud’s Illuminations.  Maldoror, Hebdomeros.  Giacomo Leopardi.  Hart Crane.  Oppen’s Of Being Numerous.  Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes.  Riddles, sayings, found language.  Anything that defamiliarizes language so that new contexts may emerge, à la  Ponge through a kind of phenomenological approach.  Or Spicer, through a semiological one.  I like the way some of Ron Silliman’s poetry appears to discover a nimbus around garden-variety objects that usually go unnoticed.

To speak of work by contemporaries, Jeff Clark’s The Little Door Slides Back was like a bizarre, marvelous gift, something I’d been waiting a long time to receive.  I’ve also felt blown away by some of Lisa Jarnot’s work, and recent books by Jennifer Moxley and Devin Johnston.  I’m thoroughly enjoying Christine Hume’s Alaskaphrenia right now.  Then there are many writers in and around Chicago who influence me in different ways.  New York may have the Gizzis, but we’ve got the O’Learys.

When did you become a poet?

I guess I started writing things I thought of as poems around age twenty.

Your book Transparencies Lifted from Noon has a profound Italian influence.  How does Italian poetry affect your poetics?

I feel like I’m still getting to know Italian poetry.  I haven’t read Ariosto or Tasso.  I want to read more of twentieth century poets like Pavese or Pasolini, whose films I’m getting to know.  But I’d definitely mention Montale’s hermetic intensity, Ungaretti’s ability to achieve terse lyrical abundance from the horrific.

The Italian influence comes mainly from having lived there, in Pisa, for a little over a year.  I have close friends there, and can speak the language pretty well.  As I mentioned, Leopardi is an important poet to me.  I lived in a building directly across from one he lived in, and every day I’d see a plaque on its façade announcing that he had composed “To Silvia” there.  Pisa is a small place—smaller than many of the suburbs around Chicago where I grew up—but there are similar plaques along the Arno for Byron and Shelley.  Living in Italy, one of the things that sometimes overwhelmed me was the relentless impingement of history and high culture I felt just walking around.  I think Italians find it overwhelming too, but in a different way.  It seemed that just about anyone there could recite some of The Divine Comedy or Quasimodo’s Ed è subito sera whether they identified as liking poetry or not.  The last time I visited, my friend’s son was reading Catullus in Latin for high school, and we were both rolling around laughing as he translated the bawdier parts into Italian.  I don’t think he leans toward poetry, but it was great to see the total delight he was taking in Catullus’s way with words.

I started studying and translating some of Leopardi’s work after I returned to the States.  A few years ago, I began translating work by some contemporary poets, mainly from Florence:  Maura Del Serra, Francesco Giuntini.  Last spring I finished translating a collection of poems by Alberto Caramella at his request called The Subject Is the Sea.  Translation can be a formidable whetstone for craft.  I have tried in a short essay to articulate something about how translation may feed into one’s own writing, but really the whole process is incredibly mysterious.  It involves re-thinking, re-seeing one language through another.  In doing it, one steps outside habitual confines, experiences the world in a strange new way, and then attempts to import that strangeness back into a more familiar mode of operation.  A super-literal translation of the Italian for “foreign language” would be “strange tongue.”  But in a typical context, lingua straniera would resonate for the listener more closely to “foreign language.”  I am very attracted to this doubleness, which hints at the arbitrary, at instability.  I think it may be more salient to an outsider (stranger), which is what the translator always is, to some degree.  In The Gay Science (a troubadour synonym for poetry, by the way) Nietzsche writes that “Truth begins with two.”

Favorite team or sport?

I’ll admit that I root for “the Cub.”  I’m looking forward to the centennial of appalling futility.  I think there should be some kind of city monument to it, other than Wrigley Field.

Favorite food?

Italian or Indian.

Vacation spot?

What’s a “vacation”?

Swear word?

Porca miseria!

Transparencies Lifted from Noon is a real tour de force, a clean break with other poetry written today.  What was your intention in writing it?  Did you wish to break new ground or did it just happen?

Wow, that’s a generously worded question, but I could certainly point to precedents that for me would belie any notion of new ground.  When I was starting to write this book I was actually feeling discouraged.  Joshua Clover, who I’ve known for more than fifteen years now, sent me a note advising me to take stock of what I thought I was trying to do, and then to “radicalize your poetic.”  That’s an excellent dictum for any writer I think.

How do you begin to write a poem?

Usually I just start writing.  Sometimes I have in mind an idea or problem based on something I’ve been reading or discussing with someone.  If I feel stuck I might give myself an assignment or utilize a formal scheme.  I think this process is evolving though, in that these days I have a clearer sense of what I want to do before I start writing—even though it might take a draft or two or three to articulate what that is.

Many poets don’t seem to be deep readers of poetry today.  Is there any work, poetry or otherwise, that you think is essential?

Most of the poets I communicate with on some kind of regular basis are very well-read.  Several of them leave me feeling daunted by the apparent scope of their reading.  But everyone has gaps.  I could make a sizable list of things I haven’t read, but want to or feel like I should have.  On the question of what’s essential, I think every writer has to discover what this is for her or himself.  To find it is essential.

Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?

It’s an organic synthesis.

Where do you write?  Is ambience important for you?

I usually write at a desk in my study.  I prefer it to be quiet, and so my wife won’t bother me I put a note on the door that says “working” in pink highlighter.  I wish my cat Elsa could read.

In the space between created language and found language where do you fall?

I think it’s all found.

Your process of writing, is it more like sculpture or painting?

More like painting, but it can become more sculptural the more I revise.