An Interview with Gregory Pardlo
The author of the award-winning poetry collections Totem (2007) and Digest (2016), and the memoir Air Traffic (2018), Gregory Pardlo has been a consistent voice in American letters for nearly two decades. For our newest issue, we are meditating on the word “repair,” specifically from theological and ecological perspectives. Our Interviews Editor Esteban Rodriguez sat down with Gregory to speak on what it means to engage in acts of repair, and how the implications can change the way we look at the world and ourselves.
Esteban Rodriguez: Your series of poems from “Giornata: On Faith” reflect on the daily practice of working toward something that faith requires, and in section eleven, you’ve stated that the “speaker contemplates what it means to repair or restore faith in a relationship after that faith has been compromised.” How do you, as a poet, writer, and editor, approach restoration in your everyday life and in your writing career?
Gregory Pardlo: Repair, restoration, amends: these are constant themes for me. As a recovering alcoholic and a fan of psychotherapy--and as a black poet--I spend a good deal of time negotiating my relationship to the past. Many of my emotional challenges have resulted from my resistance to repair, my reluctance to “look back.” But I came to understand that my reluctance to look back was also a reluctance to look inward. While I told myself that I was focused on repairing my relationships, I realized I was resisting the necessary work of self-repair. Anyway, I think the word for that is guilt. Guilt, and its flip-side, shame, became my distractions of choice. Rather than embrace a practice of repair and restoration, I revelled in the little jolt of electricity I’d get from fingering some old scab of guilt or shame. So repair for me is an ongoing practice. Each time I approach the page, I have to balance the books, so to speak, offer a kind of prayer of gratitude for the opportunity to learn from the past and to take another step toward becoming the kind of person I’d like to be in the world. That step requires imagination, and the imagination won’t serve while it’s chained to shame. It’s important to note here that my everyday life and my writing practice are indistinguishable.
ER: You’re the author of two poetry collections (Totem and Digest), as well as the memoir Air Traffic. Rereading your work, I was drawn to the relationship with your father in both your poetry and prose, and in the poem “Winter After the Strike,” from Totem, the speaker reveals the following at the end:
That winter after the strike,
we were so poor you sold everything but the house. Tell me, Dad,
when you’d stand at the door calling me for the night,
could you hear me speaking to the snowflakes falling beneath the lamppost?
Could you hear me out there imitating you imitating prayer?
The speaker here doesn’t seem to have the language yet to help his father with the process of healing, but he wants it, and hopes that his imitation will substitute for the real thing. As a writer, one of the most important things we have is language, so how has your language toward ‘repair’ changed with each book, and how has each of your books contributed to this ongoing practice of becoming the person you’d like to be?
GP: Wow, that’s a really good question. I only just now noticed how the word “prayer” nestles sonically in “repair.” Not quite an anagram, but like yin-yang. As I’ve mentioned, my lived experience and my writing life are the same. Like that Charlie Parker quote, “if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” I’d add that what comes out of your horn, in turn, influences the way you live. Each book shapes my life as I write it because it requires me to take ownership of what I put on the page. Air Traffic, for example, documents the process of me revealing myself to myself. I’ve learned from bearing witness to other people’s truths on the page--not the content of someone’s story, necessarily, but the way a poet or memoirist might surrender to her truth as it is revealed to her by the mysterious action of her pen on the page or her fingers on the keyboard, and I wanted to engage in that process. So I think what’s happened over the years is that the language hasn’t changed so much as the quality of my attention. I’m much more interested in the work being the site of repair, and not just a description of it. I want the poem or essay to be the record of such an event.
ER: Do poems and essays create the sites of repairs differently, or do you find that there is no distinction? And how do you think that these sites rendered in each genre create the same or similar space that you yourself inhabit for readers?
GP: This gets back to the idea of faith, right? I don’t presume to know how a literary object works on a reader, but I do trust that the reader who comes to my work in good faith will experience some kind of mirror effect. Whether they do in fact or not is frankly none of my business. What’s important for me is that my work enacts a sort of Pascal’s wager by which I behave as if the work is as important for the reader as it is for me. That “as if” has everything to do with genre. Genre is the fill-in-the-blanks standard contract between the writer and the reader. Only, genre is a contract that is negotiated at the point of execution. In other words, the writer negotiates the terms of the contract through the act of writing. The reader negotiates the contract through the act of reading. (The critic is the judge who presumes to determine whether or not the terms of that contract, after all is said and done, either have been satisfied or, in the case of the critic who champions a work that readers find difficult or challenging or that time has forgotten, try to compel readers to accept the terms of that contract.) If I’m using the standard contract called “Essay,” then I have to be sensitive to how far a reader may be willing to deviate from its terms--the conventions of the genre--in my pursuit of repair. It doesn’t matter how effective the medicine is--changing the metaphor--if the reader can’t stomach it. These are the risks every writer takes.
ER: What was the inspiration and origin behind “Giornata: On Faith”? Is this series a part of a larger work? And do you approach each of your books with an end goal in mind, or do you find that they come together, as some might say, organically?
GP: This particular series grew out of a conversation my wife and I had with our therapist--we share a therapist--during which it occurred to me that I had been thinking about fidelity in a very narrow way. Faith, to be faithful, is not a passive thing. It requires holding the object of faith in mind. It’s not a given because you’re a good person. Faith is a quality of attention. In 2019, I had the incredible good fortune to spend time at Civitella, an artist’s residency in Umbria, Italy. Almost weekly, the Director, Dana Prescott, who is first an art historian, would lead the fellows on field trips to visit paintings and frescoes in the region. During one of our excursions, as we walked some medieval street, she pointed out these rainbow-like arrangements of cobblestones and explained that each was the result of a day’s work--within the radius of the workman’s reach. She called this “day’s work”--the term comes from art history--giornata. I had already begun drafting a long poem that I was calling “An Essay on Faith.” And as form is an extension of content, as Charles Olson tells us, it seemed natural that the essay should consist of fragments representing the daily work of faith in its many forms and applications. My rule was not that each section should be composed in a day, but that each should reflect a level of intensity (or, as is sometimes the case, frivolity) that captures the spirit of a day’s work for me. If, during revision, it seemed like the fragments wanted to become full-on poems, I’d let them out of the cloister of the essay to pursue less metaphysical ambitions. But that mold allowed me to think about the role of faith interpersonally, that once I believe I know someone (my wife, say) completely, I begin to take them for granted, which is a form of disrespect. The same can be said for faith on a more spiritual level, and the form also allowed me to consider the role of faith and spirituality in my life. It is nothing short of miraculous that I have been on this earth as long as I have, but I’ve developed habits that obscure the fact of that miracle, and even after getting sober, I sometimes find myself taking my family, health and security for granted. These giornati (would that be the plural?) remind me to respect the larger mysteries we inhabit.
To answer your craft question, I tend to approach each poem as a project, but this new book takes up questions like faith and fear that I’ve been wrestling with for all of my adult life, questions that I know I will never exhaust. The book just happens to be the one format available to me to work on these questions. I don’t have an end goal.
ER: This past year has been quite challenging due to the pandemic and the various injustices of police violence, and people have tried to find various ways to cope with loss, loneliness, and the uncertainty that lingers from one day to the next. What and who has continued to give you faith in the face of such turmoil?
GP: My two teen-aged daughters have been a real inspiration over the past year. I know how corny and obvious that sounds, but not having any answers for them, and realizing that they have been experiencing this health crisis and the shutdown and the protests, realizing that they own this historical moment in a way that their mother and I never can--I don’t feel helpless so much as I feel my own impending obsolescence. When my girls were little, we read the children’s book Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. It’s the story of a young donkey who finds this magic pebble that grants wishes when touched. One day, young Sylvester is out walking alone and he finds a magic pebble. I think he’s had a fight with his parents and stormed off, but I might be adding that part for drama. Anyway, he’s found this pebble and, while he’s holding it, he encounters a lion. He’s too young to handle the problem on his own so instead of confronting the lion, Sylvester wishes to become a rock. The magic pebble turns him into a small boulder the size of a floor-model television. Now he’s stuck because, literally petrified, he can’t hold the pebble, and can no longer wish himself back into donkey-dom. The part of the story that still gives me the sweats is that one day, after Sylvester’s parents have grieved their loss, they go on a walk and choose to picnic by this convenient little boulder, which happens to be Sylvester’s haunted tomb/stone. For this past year, I’ve felt like Sylvester, and I’ve seen my kids as the loved-ones who must carry on in useless, but meaningful proximity. I’ve been inspired by my kids’ resiliency and their ability to rearrange, in the space of a few months, their entire concept of “future.” I have faith in them even as I feel limited in my ability to equip them for the post-pandemic, BLM world.
ER: What words can you offer those whose faith has yet to find steady ground or who are still seeking an outlet (perhaps such as writing) where they can create a site of repair for themselves?
GP: You know, that’s interesting. As an artist, at least in the way that I think about what it means to be an artist, I’m not in the business of giving advice. As a person who is attentive to their capacity for weakness and failure, I wouldn’t be so bold as to presume that I had wisdom worth offering. That doesn’t release me from the responsibility to be of service to others. I’d prefer to be someone who reliably shows up when called, in the hope of providing the steady ground where it is in my ability to do so.
ER: You have no doubt been in service to those who’ve found comfort, inspiration, and guidance in your work. What writing is on the horizon that readers can look forward to?
GP: That’s kind of you to say, thank you. I’m working on poems that consider the ways fear served as a legal justification for killing white women in medieval Europe and colonial North America, and then black men since the so-called Enlightenment. Other populations have been made to suffer capital and extrajudicial punishment for being “frightening” to the (white) patriarchy in this way, but I’m interested in unpacking the logic of targeting black men and white women in particular because these compound, obscure, and intensify the physical and institutional violence toward black women. There was a meme not too long ago that said maybe white folks would care more about institutional racism if somebody put an avocado on it. I’m hoping to put an avocado on violence against black women by approaching it through our shared abhorrence of witch hunting and lynching, not to make white people care about it, but to elevate the concern and contribute to the discourse around the protection of black women.
ER: To what extent do you see poetry, and literature, helping us--as a community, society, or merely as individuals--overcome the fears that stem from the past and that we encounter in the current moment?
GP: The thing about fear is that it exists in the imagination. It’s a reaction to a harm that has not occurred. I am in no way saying that fear is unjustified or illusory. I am saying that fears are realized in the same way that poems are. The object of the imagination--which, in the perceptual space of the poem, does not exist--must be conjured so intensely as to make it seem real. And like most poetry, most fear presents itself as prophetic when it is in fact mnemonic. When we ask someone to read a poem, we’re asking them to reach into their storehouse of memory to gather a variety of old sense perceptions and experiences to mirror those described by the poem in a way that feels like they’re creating a new, real experience. When police, for example, are culturally and institutionally trained to fear black people, the thing they fear exists in their imaginations. They’ve been made to conjure that fear so intensely that to them it seems real. There are many ways to bring about social change. Some people protest. Some work in law and public policy. Some reveal the facts of history. I choose to work in the field of the imagination hoping to create positive rather than prohibitive associations between humans and the world.
