Interview with Sean Singer on his book Discography

Music affects the form in that each poem's form is determined by its subject matter; for example, in "The Old Record," the spacing and movement of lines was intended to mirror the spinning motion of a record. The title served as the sleeve and the exclamation mark served as the stylus, which then allows Robert Johnson's song to play. Before industrial diamonds became the standard, the highest quality phonograph needles were made with a sapphire tip. Cheaper ones were plain steel, and some early needles were made of wood or even thorn. Sometimes old records say on the label "For Sapphire Needle." In my poem, it's an exclamation mark. The word "nidifugous" means "leaving the nest a short time after hatching," and is a thread to the poem about Charlie Parker, known as Bird.

Another example: in "The Burghers of Calais," a "phantom sonnet," the middle seven lines, when the speaker escapes through the ear of his sculpture / prison and speaks, is within the outer seven lines, which serves as the external materiality (the Rodin sculpture).

Music affects the rhyme in that I attempted to select rhymes that were subtle / slant / off or, in some cases, only noticeable upon rereading. The slant rhyme is equivalent to a minor chord, and increases the uncertainty or mystery of the subject being addressed.

Music affects the meter in that it is a model of multiple rhythms being piled on other rhythms. In other cases--if you listen to Billie Holiday's voice trail just behind the beat--it offers a counterpoint or variant to the constant. In this way, the meter mirrors the vertical and horizontal rhythm of the larger structure of the poem.

The best point to work on a poem without its music playing, I guess, is when your iPod breaks. This planned obsolescence occurs every three years.

The music of the subject doesn't become too influential, because music and poems aren't equivalent. Someone said "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." I think the rhythms (whether derived from a Bach Quodlibet from The Goldberg Variations, the wind moving through wheat, or Charlie Haden's bass line in "Una Muy Bonita") are merely another tool in a poet's toolbox by which he / she can express something.

Nate Zoba: Your poems are often addressed or appear addressed to specific subjects. What forms do their inception take place in: lyrical, prosaic, epistolary? If is either of the latter, how do you use music or incorporate music to make them more lyrical? Are there specific elements of music you find the most useful in applying to poems? Are there elements you find unhelpful or should be avoided?

Sean Singer: I think the form--lyrical, prosaic, epistolary--should be determined because of what the subject matter is. As far as music is concerned, I think if poems are lacking musicality, then the writer has essentially missed the bus.

I think there's been some conflating of music as subject matter and music as metaphor. I'm more interested in music as metaphor. For example, jazz is about choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. A writer should maintain a general affection for the universe. In this sense, jazz is a metaphor for choosing to describe the humanity of the subject rather than infusing writing with judgments, such as scorn.

I do not believe the writer's ability or inability to describe accurately to be a technical or semantic issue, as it's often taught; I believe this accuracy to be an ethical issue. It's is a result of an empathic approach to subject matter that I, as a writer, can take responsibility for my relationship to the subject. If I write abstractly, or choose my words incorrectly, it's probably because I haven't sufficiently come to terms, in a psychological sense, who I am in relation to the thing I'm describing.

Elements of music I find helpful in making poems more lyrical: listen to the bass, which is where the rhythm is kept; then listen to the telepathic interconnection among the musicians (sometimes called call and response). Using this as your model, you can learn how to maximize the various threads (images, sounds, etc.) throughout your poem. The result is the subterfuge that nothing can be omitted from the poem; everything is holistically connected to everything else.

Jazz is a way of moving through, or existing in, the world. It's a way of thinking. Jazz is improvised music. For me, jazz is a method of seeing how to create art: Can I create a poem that appears simultaneously spontaneous, yet inevitable?

Unhelpful: Don't attempt to recreate in words what you've heard in music. Instead, listen to what the music is telling you; the way to live. By this method, the lesson you learn is that your poems should sound more like you and less like anyone else drifting around the neighborhood.

Joshua Lobb: What do you consider to be the responsibility of a poet? If such a thing exists.

Sean Singer: It does exist. I think if someone tells you it doesn't exist, the person is lying to you. The poet is responsible to try to describe, even if the subject matter is misunderstood, or not understood. The poet is responsible to choose this word over that word and to be psychologically prepared to let those choices manifest his or her personality in the world.

Responsibility is closely connected to the idea of empathic questioning. I'm 33. For most people in our generation, during the Politically Correct Movement, we were taught tolerance, especially vis-à-vis diversity. However, if you're told to tolerate someone or something, it implies that you're starting from a place of intolerance. It's much more honest and useful for a writer, however, to use the idea of empathy, which is a way of psychologically trying to understand where the other person is coming from.

Empathic questioning is nothing like Socratic questioning. It is a more humane way of understanding, and therefore it benefits writing. Besides, if we really respect diversity, and want to live in a diverse society, then we don't need to agree all the time. We can be content with variations.

I think when students write something abstract, vague, general, nonspecific, or inaccurate, it's not a technical issue, but an ethical issue. The writer has not sufficiently taken responsibility for the thing he / she is writing about. The writer hasn't taken a stand, and its attendant responsibility, and as a way of absolving himself / herself, has decided to use the most bland, vanilla, vague, or abstract word possible.

We're so used to living lightly in the everyday world, that we don't want to admit there's an existential crisis when we make poems, which is this: if I'm choosing this word over that word, then I'm forced to be responsible for that choice.

In this way, writing is a metaphor for life itself. It is a way of saying who I am, living life passionately, and living exuberantly. Jazz has been called "the velocity of celebration." If we view our poems in this empathic / existential way, then we see our poem and our life is ours to create. The poem makes a difference in material terms, in terms of other people, and it makes a difference because it's always our decision who we are.

Joshua Lobb: Do you have any goals as a writer or do you separate the concept of success from your writing progression?

Sean Singer: My goal is to write the next poem. Confounding success and writing progression leads to limitation, which is really a way to kill you. One of the only good things about being a writer is that you have absolute freedom to write about anything you want, in any way you want. The moment you try to write to please someone, you lose that freedom.

Stephen Nachmanovich, in his book, Free Play, writes that there are six fears which prevent artists from attaining this freedom: 1) Fear of loss of life; 2) Fear of loss of livelihood; 3) Fear of loss of reputation; 4) Fear of unusual states of mind; 5) Fear of speaking before an assembly; 6) Fear of ghosts, by which I mean parents, teachers, and authority figures.

When I started writing poems, there was nothing at stake... it didn't matter if I wrote or not, if I wrote well or not; now, after being successful as a poet, there are external and internal pressures, which label me and my work in various ways; labels are limits and they're really meant to kill you. How do I get back, I ask myself, to a place of freedom?

In the so-called War on Terror, much nefarious talk is dedicated to the idea that freedom is this vague, blanket abstraction; that it's a feeling or something that can be brought by force; though, for a writer, choosing to fill a blank sheet of paper with something from oneself, it is a material possession or a material lack.

Joshua Lobb: You highlight or reference historical figures in a number of your poems--what would you say the impetus behind this is? A desire to re-envision the past, to educate, etc.?

Sean Singer: I see the act of writing as an opportunity to address the violence of history (e.g. the Holocaust, colonialism, slavery). Either writing is an anodyne for those instances of violence, or it isn't, but it allows the writer to decide how and in what manner those events (from a book or from one's own life) can be described. The conventional thinking on this is that people are social constructions or stereotypes, the victims of a confluence of forces, or fragmented or marginalized; writing about the past in a new way is sort of a revolt against those limitations.

Andrew Galligan: Poetry and painting have been called sister arts. I would include music in that family. Who are your favorite painters and why?

Sean Singer: Of painters working today, I like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Ellen Gallagher, Kara Walker, for instance. My favorite might be Vermeer; certain things, like the way the light always enters from the left, the way metaphor works in his pictures, the opening of dream-life into the external world, etc. suggests ways of thinking that most poets haven't approached.

All my life I've been very good at drawing, and if I didn't write, I'd do that. It came more easily to me than did writing, but I use the skill now mostly for drawing bunnies for my 1 1/2 year-old daughter, Maya Lily.

Andrew Galligan What's your impetus for using your own name to create characters in your poems? Which ones, if any, are most like you? Which don't you like?

Sean Singer: It's often easier to write about oneself through a mask. I got the idea for the Singer poems from Paul Zimmer. It's also similar to Berryman's Henry in The Dream Songs. "Singer Finds His Own Name Among The Dead" was my first published poem (published by Kevin Prufer at Pleiades) and was based on a real incident when I saw the name Singer at the memorial at Prague. He can say and do things I can't, and he can even die at the end. Also, since my / his name is Singer, he serves as a kind of metaphor for the jazz singer, thus it's another thread by which I was able to connect the quieter, more local poems with the other music-related or history poems.

The one most like me... difficult to say, since I don't now remember my state of mind when I wrote them. Also, I feel so individualistic that I'm not even like myself, which depresses me.

Which don't I like? I don't think "Singer and Circumcision" or "Dear Singer," which is based on an incident when I was assaulted by four guys when I was in high school, are my favorite... if I wrote them now I might write those differently.

Andrew Galligan Your poems employ words from many generations, historical eras, cultures, etc. - many people, places, and times. Do you think of life or existence as lacking boundaries or such imposed definitions? Do you naturally think, and thus write, in all these different tongues?

Sean Singer: When Rilke had no word in German that sufficed, he used French. I think what you said is accurate, that if life lacks imposed boundaries, so should the language. When there's no word in any language, I will invent my own word.

Rose Woodson: Which writers influenced you?

Sean Singer: Personally: Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Frost, Catherine Bowman, Carl Phillips, William Gass, and Erin Belieu.

Spiritually: Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Italo Svevo, Melville, Jerzy Kosinski, Camus, Sartre, Joyce, Bob Kaufman, Etheridge Knight, Wallace Stevens, Robert Graves, etc.

Rose Woodson: Do you have a preference for any particular form?

Sean Singer: I prefer organic form, which is form organically wedded to the subject matter. For example, "The Old Record," "Ota Benga," or "The Throne of the Third Heaven," which the intricate rhyme scheme somehow matches the intricate structure of the sculpture. Another example: the third section of "Ellingtonia," where his initials allowed a movement of various images leading to the transition of Espalier / Salieri. Coleridge defined organic form as the structure of a work that has grown naturally from the author's subject and materials as opposed to that of a work shaped by and conforming to artificial rules.

Rose Woodson: Why is music so entrenched in your poetry? Sean Singer: I love music. It provides a metaphor for manipulating language in a way that's more like me and less like anyone else. Perhaps I really wanted to be a musician, but I use poems instead of an alto saxophone. The saxophone was originally intended to be a cure for asthma. Afflicted patients were supposed to inhale and exhale a bulb of laudanum--a solution of opium in alcohol--for 20 minutes twice a day. But they would get too bored to do the treatment, so Antoine Adolphe Sax, added the keys and reed so they could play a simple tune to entertain themselves while the drugs worked, and he named it after himself. He died penniless.

Vince Francone: The poems in Discography place a lot of referential demands on the reader. Do you feel it necessary for the reader to be aware of these references in order to fully grasp your work? I ask because of the notes at the end of the collection. They imply that you would like the reader to be aware of who or what you are writing about.

Sean Singer: I don't think it's necessary for the reader to be aware of the reference, though if the reader is aware of them, then perhaps the poems can be appreciated on another level, or multiple levels. The notes were there to provide, as in a biography, context and data to support the expressionist threads in the poems. For my poems which required a lot of research (e.g. Ota Benga, The Throne of the Third Heaven...) I have file folders containing newspaper articles, photos, etc. called "extensions." The notes are the basic facts detailed in the extensions.

Vince Francone: Craft question: Music plays a large part in Discography. The movements in the poems mirror musical shifts. How did you consciously cultivate this musical influence in your work? Or, what methods/techniques proved most successful in achieving this jazz effect?

Sean Singer: Jazz is uniquely American in origin, and combines African polyrhythm, European instrumentation and harmony, mixed in an American context. The ability of the music to "worry" a predetermined idea (often called the "head") based on the soloist's personality and imagination is a good lesson for the direction of a poem.

I wanted to write rhythms that were not merely accentual or syllabic or accentual-syllabic, but could cultivate a new kind of energy that is heard in the Charlie Parker's Quintet, for example. I can hear the rhythms I want to write, in a way, before I know which words to impose on those rhythms.

Additionally, the rhythms are given meaning by the pauses between the notes. Likewise, the words in a poem are given meaning by the caesuras, which are blank spaces on the page. The white space on the page is tantamount to silence, which may be the true poem.

Vince Francone: Poems like "The Old Record" are remarkably "free" while others seem to adhere to form. (And then there's the prose structure of "The Golem.") Do you privilege so-called free verse over form? Or, how concerned are you with formal elements?

Sean Singer: "The Old Record" isn't free--its form is dictated by the content of the creation and experience of a licorice pizza. Also, the title refers to the historical record, and also the verb, "to record," so it implied the subsequent poems served as a witness to various historical events.

I wanted, at least in my first book, to show an ability to write in a range of forms, either given forms (like sonnets) or in nonce forms. I don't privilege free verse over form, as I think it depends on what I'm writing. In general, I'm extremely concerned with formal elements.

The materiality of thought for a writer is language. The way an architect uses the materiality of glass, steel, or brick to configure and give meaning to empty space, so that when we enter the space we know if it's a public space or a sacred space, etc. the writer uses language to configure and give meaning to the blank space on the page. When we, as humans, enter this space we understand who we are in relation to the space. Psychologically, we can only feel like a person if we understand who we are in relation to empty space or silence. This would explain Freud's theory about lying on a sofa and staring at the ceiling during psychoanalysis: it allows the mind to open.

Form, then, is really a way of saying who we are internally in relation to the external world. And rhythm is Form cut into Time.

Virginia Smith: I'm curious whether your poetry affects your teaching, and vice-versa; do you notice your teaching experience affecting your poetry?

Sean Singer: Poetry is about putting things together and teaching is about taking things apart; so, they're different entities. Though teaching requires me to articulate what I normally don't express, but only feel. I like teaching because it keeps me working, and life is just work and maintaining friendships.

Virginia Smith: What are you working on now? Most poets seem to have particular obsessions/preoccupations they home in on - have you seen significant changes either in theme or form in your newer work?

Sean Singer: I think the writing in my new manuscript is much stronger. It's called Carbon Chain and is in three sections. The first section, called Diverse, has poems concerning various writers and poets who faced self-destruction or chronic suicide in the face of war, terror, or violence. This section includes poems on: Albert Ayler, Franz Kafka, Ken Burns, Albert Camus, Max Roach, Max Ernst, Italo Svevo, Vincent van Gogh, Stefan Zweig, Richard Pryor, Hedy Lamarr, Mary Lou Williams, Bruno Schulz, Hank Mobley, and Charlie Parker.

The second section, called Segment, is one long poem, with long lines, is about the whaling industry in the 19th century. The whale hunts were centered around Nantucket Island; although they were Quakers and espoused nonviolence, they hunted whales because the oil in the whales' heads was used for electricity and soap, and the ambergris in their stomachs for perfume. The men would leave for two years or more and the women would run the island, since they had an egalitarian society. In the sperm whale populations they hunted, the male whales hunt for squid several miles below the ocean, and the female whales raise the calves in large groups. So, the gender relationships in the humans and whales mirrored each other.

The third section, called Passport, contains obliquely geopolitical poems; Hanoi, Cuba, the Israeli-Jordanian border crossing, Petra, Tel Aviv, Brooklyn, Connecticut, and so forth.

The themes and forms are in a sense even more demanding and "difficult" than in Discography, but so is the world. I've been writing long lines--they're as long as possible while still being lyrical, and some of the poems (like the ones on Kafka and Camus, for example) are pages of prose. The music is complex and layered. The Kafka piece appeared in Salmagundi and the Camus piece appeared in Drunken Boat. The Whale piece appeared in Memorious, which also published some cartoons I drew of Robert Frost, Richard Howard, and Jorie Graham. Most of the "Passport" section appeared as an e-chapbook in Beard of Bees.com. Nearly all of the poems in this manuscript have been published, so you can find them online, if you're curious.

Also, just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your collection - love the way you are using image and language - also absolutely love "Frida Kahlo" - looking forward to reading more of your work.--Virginia Smith

Sean Singer: Thanks, Virginia. I hope I conveyed the seriousness with which I take poetry, writing, all this stuff. Maybe if and when my second manuscript is published, you can enjoy that one, too.

I will briefly say something about the poems each of you annotated:

"Photo of Coltrane" is a phantom sonnet based on a photography by Roy DeCarava, who said "There is never a wrong note in jazz because each note can be redeemed by the next note."

The image of the fried grasshopper in "Frida Kahlo" is from something I saw in Oaxaca, Mexico. Some Zapotec girls in the market were holding these red peppers in a basket saying "chapulinas," a word I'd never heard. But it turned out they were salty, fried grasshoppers and not peppers.

"Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn" uses pronouns in such a way that attempts to show a Cubist vision of perspective.

"The Golem" shows the circularity of violence with the three instances of the phrase "who killed".

I became aware of Ota Benga after seeing the plaster cast of his head in the museum in St. Louis. It's a phantom sonnet series. I especially like the contrast of his inner thoughts "There is darkness..." with his actually speaking voice in section 5. I also like the way the mirror is real and a metaphor in sections 4 and 5. The poem isn't about how hard it is to be black, or how hard it is to be a pygmy, but rather about how hard it is to be Ota Benga. It expressed something, for me, about feeling like an outsider.

My girlfriend at the time I wrote most of the poems in Discography was a soprano. "The Vocal Fabric..." and "But Beautiful" attempt to say something about her.

Rachel Chamberlain: How do you view the line in relation to the music of your poetry? At times, your lines seem tight and controlled, like a musician's score. How much of that is intentional? Do you spend immense amounts of time re-working the line, or does the line present itself to you in the beginnings of the poem? For instance, do you set out knowing if a poem should have a lot of white space and breath versus a more structured and linear composite-like structure?

Sean Singer: This is an important question, and something I've thought about quite a lot. The line is primarily what makes a poem a poem and not prose. It slows the reader down, and it insists that the reader pay attention. So, there is an intimate relationship between attention and intention.

Everything in a poem should be intentional: its nature as subterfuge and artifice demands that the wizard behind the curtain has made deliberate choices about the words, images, rhythms, and line breaks.

Intention, though, I find, manifests itself on both the conscious and unconscious level. The psychodynamic mechanism of writing allows this flux to occur. It often takes me months or a year to make a poem: it is the product of years of thought, reading, reflection, and ability, but the actual creation of the poem takes no time at all. Then, I revise a little. I get this sensation from reading Keats or from listening to Miles Davis. The product happened after years of thought and talent and practice, but the actually creation of the thing just happened.

When I'm really writing--this is going to sound mystical--it's almost as if I'm taking transcription. An example of this occurred with the Robert Johnson poem you kindly and thoughtfully annotate. In the final line, I had initially intended to write "great" night, but I type very quickly, and I wrote "grape," which superficially was a mistake. But there's no such thing as a mistake, because in those moments the mind is telling you something.

Grape is much more sensual: the purple color of night, the roundness of the sky, and the organic implications of night... these are wrapped in the image of the grape; "great" has no meaning and no implications. The mind also feels everything it thinks. In that moment, my unconscious mind was doing the writing that my conscious mind could not. If at all possible, a writer should train herself to do that as frequently as possible.

One lesson is to tell yourself to go home and write three bad poems. It can't be done! It's impossible to write three bad poems consciously because the unconscious writer's talent and ability will take over and write well. It's only when you try to consciously write something good that only crap comes out of the pencil. Fear sabotages our writing.

In his book, Effortless Mastery, Kenny Werner describes a simple test to prove poetry [he was talking about jazz] isn't that important: Go to the kitchen and get a plastic bag. Place it over your head, so the opening is snug around your neck, so no air can get through. Now, count to one hundred. By the count of 20, how important is poetry? Are there "burning issues"? Is Jorie Graham or Charles Simic important? By the count of 35, would you be debating whether or not form or free verse is the real poetry? By 54, no doubt you would be contemplating whether poetry should be a certain way, or whether or not Robert Pinsky is really where it's at. At 73, the question would burn in your consciousness; "Is John Barr of the Poetry Foundation for real?"

The point is that the only thing that's important is your next breath. The mind is a dictator because it sends you messages like: you must write good; or "I can't really write well because I'm a student," or "I'm a woman," or "I don't know anyone in publishing." These illusions limit the real unconscious writer who is really there.

All of this relates to your original question of the line: I know that short lines, like those of Emily Dickinson or Robert Creeley, are like little portraits in a frame or like jewels. There's not much movement--horizontally or vertically--in a poem with short lines. On the other hand, long lines, like those of Walt Whitman, are like a horse racing through a river. There's much more movement. The line becomes like a collapsible telescope: how long can it get before we need to prop it up with our arm? Short lines move faster than long lines, which move slower.

The line needs its own integrity, because it is the spine along which the information is delivered to the reader's ear. But the mind be trained to know / feel which lines have the integrity and which are not.

Rachel Chamberlain: How do you reconcile an abundance of musically referential language? Are you ever concerned the reader won't "get it" ...silly question, I know. I, personally, enjoy a good dig for meaning. I just wonder how much of that writer's critic voice is in your head when it comes to choosing language--or, does the language choose you?

Sean Singer: People ask this or a variation of this all the time because it's inextricably bound with questions of readership, audience, and being understood or not being understood; at some level, writers (unless they're Dickinson or Kafka) are longing for a connection.

I think you must imagine a reader who is at least as sensitive and intelligent as you are. The writer must imagine the reader as her stunt-double: how will the reader judge these choices I've made; will the reader think the writer has made the right or wrong choices? Likewise, the reader must imagine the writer as her stunt-double: has the writer made the right choices and why did the writer make these choices?

Nothing is the world or in life is interesting. We merely invest things with our interest. Language is tantamount to thinking. A writer's choices of language and grammar best show how he is thinking. When we discuss writers we admire, we're really saying that we like how that writer's mind is working. The writing amounts to the writer's wisdom.

In a poem, that experience is particularly heightened, fraught, magnetized, and intimate. I say intimate because, for example, when I read a poem, the poet's thoughts and imagination in the past are physically manifested by my breath and body in the present. This is as intimate a connection as you can get without touching. In the case of reading a poet who's died, this connection provides a kind of time travel, as well.

I'm never really concerned about the reader getting it, if the thing that needs to be gotten is an allusion or reference. He can look it up easily on the Internet or in a book or by calling a librarian. However, if the reader doesn't "get it" because of a flaw in the logic of the thinking, then that is the writer's fault.

Any reader can apply her own intelligence and life experience to any set of words; this is what we mean by meaning.

Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and grew up in Florida. His first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems appear in Drunken Boat, La Petite Zine, Salmagundi, Tin House, Pleiades and others. He lives in Harlem, New York City.