Cast Down in Words
An Interview with Nick Courtright
The pandemic has changed the way people do many things, from work to hobbies to how they view entertainment, and for those a part of the literary community, it has no doubt changed how they interact with texts. For some, the attachment has waned, but for others, books have become that much more important, reminders of what the world can be because it deserves to be better. Whatever camp one finds themselves in, new work is still being presented to audiences each day, and no one quite does a better job at engaging with the literary community than Nick Courtright, poet, scholar, and publisher. Courtright’s work, as Octavio Quintanilla so aptly expresses, “explores the intersections of being a citizen of one country and the desire to live as a citizen of the world,” and in that same vein it gives readers the tools to pause and examine the often overlooked but important details of the people closest to them, of their surroundings, and of the texts that can inspire and influence one to understand and live life more fully, as is the case with Courtright’s newest project, The Proofs, the Figures: Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems.
Courtright is the author of the poetry collections The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, and his prose and poetry have appeared in The Harvard Review, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.
I had the privilege of sitting down with Nick to discuss his forthcoming projects, poetry and the influence of place, and how being the founder and Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press has ensured that there are equitable opportunities to publish the best voices in contemporary literature.
Nick, I really appreciate your time. Before diving into your latest project, The Proofs, the Figures: Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems, I wanted to ask about your role in the literary community. Of the many words that could sum up the past few years, “exhausting” might be one of them, and although I will not assume to know the details of how you and your family have experienced the pandemic, as well as other social changes, there is no doubt that we have all had our own means of adapting to new ways of life. Nevertheless, your role has been a vital one, and you have not only managed to continue being a successful poet and scholar, but the publisher of Atmosphere Press, an author-first collaborative publisher. Can you speak about your work with Atmosphere Press and how you managed juggling this endeavor with your writing life, not to mention your personal one. What have you learned about yourself? About being a writer?
Great question, and I do think these past couple years have been a wild whirlwind. The effect on my world as a publisher, though, actually was rather clarifying, and because blessings sometimes come in unexpected forms, a life of isolation was the perfect conduit for Atmosphere Press to serve more fully. Quite simply, when the pandemic hit, there was nothing else to do with my time than work, and all my social meanderings were focused into building a press that was ethical and helped authors well–I wanted to give authors the opportunity to have a really great publishing experience, and all of a sudden, I had more time to actually do this. Dovetailing with this was that everyone else was in the same boat: folks who usually would be spending their time and efforts on happy hours and vacations now could channel that into their own creative endeavor. So, the pandemic sparked a lockstep on need and fit for authors and Atmosphere, and we’re now publishing more than 300 books a year, which is amazing to me. So the pandemic era was really serendipitous on that one level, even as the rest of the world and so many individual lives were roiled into disorder.
As for what I learned about myself, I discovered that I really could build a company and stick to some core values of kindness and quality. I was a college professor for a dozen years and had left that career only shortly before the pandemic, so finding out that I could cut it as a CEO was fascinating and incredibly rewarding. It was like finding a whole new identity, one that my family’s working class history had always subtly led me to believe was impossible. I still get imposter syndrome about it, but when I’m in the forest of the work itself, it feels comfortable to lead. I’m the oldest of six kids, so I think I received some early training on that, haha. And about being a writer? My most recent book, The Forgotten World, is about travel, so the pandemic was definitely not providing that. I had to learn to write domestically, and to rediscover the joy of crafting art from the mundane. It’s been a good time, to relearn how to write while at my own house!
That’s really amazing. I think we all find a way into doing things that we didn’t necessarily see ourselves doing, but that turn out to be the best given the circumstances of our lives. Atmosphere Press is definitely a testament to that, and more.
As you mention, you had a recent poetry collection published, The Forgotten World, and as a poet, there are no doubt certain poets that remain if not highly influential, then at least legendary to the extent that they influence new generations of writers. Walt Whitman is in many ways an institution, and your latest project The Proofs, the Figures: Walt Whitman and the Meaning of Poems examines how we can learn to understand poetry much more meaningfully through Whitman. Can you speak about the genesis of this project and why Whitman can still teach us something today?
On the one hand, I think we don’t need Whitman at all to do what I recommend in The Proofs, the Figures, which is to welcome as expansive a view of poetic interpretive possibility as one can. We can study the words, we can look at history, we can see how a poem is presented to us via context, we can examine our own personal reactions to it, and none of these things I think are particular to Whitman. I feel like that’s the beauty of diving into poetic interpretation–you can undertake this exploratory act on quite literally any poem or non-poem the world provides. Text is always there, wanting to be understood, or, if not understood, at least considered.
But as for that venerable institution that is Whitman himself, it’s funny how he is kind of a poetic statue, right? Not necessarily even a real human being anymore. And I think that’s one of the things he can still teach us today: that he was just a person, a flawed, insecure, conflicted, ego-driven person…just like all the rest of us. He saw some beauty in the world, and also a lot of ugliness, and he cast that down in words, and then wanted people to read those words. So the idea of him as an institution I think would delight him, but also be something he’d push against using his own humanity.
I also think Whitman can teach us something about the ways to be an artist in the world. He was self-published, and did it again and again, and in today’s poetic landscape there’s a lot of emphasis on where someone got an MFA or what type of academic bonafides they have, their prestigious literary journal publication record, contests won, etc. I think it’s interesting looking at someone like Whitman who had limited formal education and who printed his own books and hawked them himself through sometimes crass means. I think it’s inspiring, this idea of the successful poet as someone who needs none of the trappings of prestige we typically demand of writers. There are a lot of ways to be an artist, and I think Whitman reminds us of that.
You do bring up a very good point with regards to seeing Whitman as a model of what can be accomplished despite the current institutional landscape. And the poem that you chose, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” itself shows a speaker who wants to be rid of the strict boundaries of instruction.
In both the fourth and fifth section of the book, you look at how meaning is created by the reader's interpretation, even that that lies outside of the prescribed notions of critical reading. As you so accurately say:
In other words, the type of judgment often made by academics when they assess value—not just in canon-building terms of what literature is worth attending to but also what interpretations are “better” than others—it is important not to see as universal or ultimately superior to other ways of understanding the nature of a text.
After a poetry reading once, I was in conversation with the other poets that read and a few poets from the audience, and one said, after purchasing our books, that it seemed as though we were all passing the same $20 back and forth. And it got me to think how insular poetry can sometimes be, whether that be in the academic or public realm. In your view, does greater work need to be done to mesh these two worlds, and where should a writer or reader begin?
That’s a great anecdote, and I do think that that in the poetry world there are a lot of poets passing the same $20 around. But I’m okay with that, because I do believe a big part of poetry’s value is the value is gives to the poet, not just to an outside reader, and who better to understand a poet than a poet? I’m personally fine if I never make a cent on my poetry, and the copyright page of The Forgotten World actually says that it can be freely distributed; I don’t actually claim copyright at all, as tightening its availability is I think antithetical to the wellbeing of the art.
Likely, though, an ideal world would be one in which non-poets read poetry, and I do think this happens quite a lot, and more than poets often think. I’ve often found my most rewarding public reading experiences to be ones where non-poets were in the audience, and were moved by something I said. There is much to gain with the “real world of real people” who aren’t specialists in this strange art. Folks have been bemoaning the end of poetry for decades. Seems to me like it’s still here.
I do think we should keep working to build bridges, and I do pursue accessibility in my work to help accomplish that. If my poetry is impossible to understand, then I’m making it exclusive, and that’s the last thing I want. I know that not everyone is going to like every poem or connect to every poem, and I’m reluctant to say something corny like “I want my book to have something for everyone,” but I do want there to be an inroads to connection for anyone in my work. And I think that that’s healthy for poetry, to not “dumb it down,” but to also not make it so academic that you need a stack of degrees to dissect it.
You use Whitman’s poem as a case study for poetic interpretation, but what past or contemporary poems (or poets and writers in general) would you recommend for further interpretative knowledge?
The beauty of poetry I think is that it’s all readymade for interpretation. Some poems you have to dig more into, and counterintuitively, it’s the “simple” poems that often demand more thoughtful labor to build rich interpretations. You can always run wild with meaning when working with a complex poet like T.S. Eliot in the past, or someone brilliant today like Traci Brimhall or Kaveh Akbar. But to construct something compelling about a Rupi Kaur poem? Because the language is more straightforward and “inspirational,” the interpreter actually needs to work harder to understand the real machinery there. That’s why I try not to be too dismissive of “popular” works, because they are doing their own kind of magic.
Speaking of your poetry, I was deeply immersed in The Forgotten World and how easily I was transported from location to location, whether it was in Peru, Italy, or in the private moments relived in the spaces people call home. Readers become witnesses to intimate perspectives about the world and your speaker’s role in it. Where did the idea for the collection come from, and what was the process like writing these poems?
I’ve always been someone who needs to be whacked in the head about a book idea for it to really start to emerge for me, so the idea for The Forgotten World only came after a bunch of the poems were written. I’m a “write whatever you need to write, and it’ll show you what you’ve written” kind of writer. The cart leads the horse, perhaps, and it’s fun to find out what the work will show me. I can say that it took forever to figure out the structure for the book, until out of nowhere the incredibly simple method of just having the book go on its own literal tour around the world popped into focus. It’s so obvious, but I had been looking I guess for some big thematic revelation when a much more practical and intuitive arrangement was there all along.
As for the process of writing them, it was fun! I felt like a journalist, a correspondent out in the world who needed to document events and the interior states those events inspired. In particular, I remember writing at midnight in a park in Lima, Peru while there were stray cats all around me. And I remember writing the poem that begins the book while in a riad (house with an open courtyard) in Fes, Morocco, thinking of how the call to prayer was calling for all of these people, but not for me. Knowing the fleeting nature of memory, writing these poems was my effort to capture time. Otherwise, with the years, all would be forgotten. And that, of course, plays into the book’s title.
I definitely can’t wait to see what inspiration leads to in your next poetry collection. To go back a bit to your vision and work with Atmosphere Press, I’m reminded of certain poets now in the canon who either struggled to publish their first books or took a more hands-on approach (Whitman being one of them). What would you say distinguishes Atmosphere from other presses? How is an author’s experience, from the beginning to the day their book is published?
I think there is some serendipity to the fact that I did my PhD on Whitman, who paved his own way without a traditional publisher, and that now I help authors pave their own way as the Executive Editor of a hybrid publisher. I’d say that dedication to an author’s vision is a big part of what distinguishes us, as we do explicitly grant authors outlier amounts of input on their text and cover design, and never twist arms about the content. Authors have to approve the cover before we move forward, for example. But that’s secondary to what I think is our biggest distinction, which is really just our accountability to authors. Whereas it’s common for folks to be ignored by publishers or agents, or, even if they’re accepted by a traditional publisher, to have to beg for attention or a response from an editor that doesn’t take weeks or months, we always make sure to respond quickly and to really give authors our time.
And that is part of the journey for the author from the beginning of the journey all the way to the end—they really are working in lockstep with us, and we never leave them hanging for weeks without an explanation of what’s going on, or where the book is at any given moment in the process. Whether it’s developmental editorial meetings, interior layout, cover design…we have professionals specialized for that work who are in direct communication with authors. I think that’s why we can keep things moving quickly—we just don’t poke around, and we always want to do right by an author’s timeline and expectations. I’m not saying it’s easy! But it’s important to us, and I think it’s funny to think of Atmosphere publishing Whitman. Like, maybe one of the later versions of Leaves of Grass? “Wait, Walt, you want to publish the same book you’ve already published a half dozen times, but this time with even more poems??” I can only imagine those editorial meetings!
I bet those meetings would be quite interesting to say the least! Speaking of journeys, we all have experiences that lead us to writing, publishing, and engaging in the joy of reading. How has yours changed from what you envisioned when you first started? How do you think you will continue to grow in the future?
I think when I first started I was rather concerned with reception: would I be taken seriously, whether other people would like the poems I was writing, “could I make it”? I think this is a pretty common starting point for people as they seek to validate themselves as an artist. I was also always worried about viability as a teacher, a poet, as a person who can pay the bills. In academia, job security can be a rather fraught and frustrating thing to pursue, and it was hard not to be eaten up by that, teaching more classes, chasing appointments, driving from campus to campus just “trying to make it work.” So, whether it be writing or publishing or reading…it’s kind of hard to be principled about it when careerist desperation drives the bus.
Over time, though, I’ve come to feel that writing is more about the buzz of joy that the writer him- or herself gets the pleasure of making. Every time I have a lull in creation, I start to forget just how damn fun it is to work on a piece of writing. Whether it be scholarship or a poem or a well-crafted email, something about chiseling a message is just a good time. So, I can’t predict the future, but I do hope I never forget that bit: that this is supposed to be fun, and that it is fun. Everything else is secondary.
