How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I came to poetry gradually, late in high school, as one of several forms I was exploring, all at the same time and with roughly the same level of casual seriousness. I remember wondering from time to time why I chose to write something as a story rather than a poem, and what made something a poem rather than a song lyric. Over time, the poem/lyric continuum in particular became more and more intriguing to me. Sometimes, for example, a poem can make an amazing song lyric, but if a lyric is good, it’s usually good in ways that seem quite distant from whatever makes a good poem. When you write lyrics, you’re engaging in a multi-media event, with the music and the vocalist’s delivery aiding the listener’s impression and understanding of the text. In fact, there were times when my lyrics were literally meaningless but still laden with significance simply by virtue of, say, the music’s energy, or through the use of repetition, which would be far less sustainable if the words were alone on a page.
Around that same time, I was very committed to the idea of becoming a fiction writer. At one point, I came up with a great first line for a story, but I kept hitting dead-ends: I couldn’t seem to take it anywhere, or come up with any story that I thought was good enough to justify the line. I briefly considered whether it might work as part of a song lyric, but I ended up using the line as the basis for a poem instead, and eventually I realized that with poetry, you can essentially tell a story without telling a story.
I think I eventually settled on poetry because it let me combine some of my favorite parts of songwriting and fiction-writing. And while I have continued to write fiction and songs, they have never again been so important to me as they were in my teens and twenties. I think it’s because of the three, poetry is the only form that still almost doesn’t make sense to me, which still challenges me.
How does a poem begin?
Poems almost always start with some sort of fragment of sound: an odd phrase or curious word; something I overheard; etc. Then I build out from there.
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
I’ve written short sequences before, and there have been times, for a few months or at most a year or so, when I was preoccupied with a certain composition style or with a theme that infused everything I wrote. But no, I’ve generally never seen my writing as a single, extended project except insofar as it’s all colored by my personal taste and style, and by my overarching idea of what I think “poetry” is supposed to be.
In fact, I’ve always had a hard time assembling my older work into manuscripts precisely because they always seemed to me like a miscellaneous jumble or grab-bag that didn’t really cohere, moving from obsession to obsession with no warning, and that the only thing the poems had in common was that someone bearing my name had written them all. A series of threads, in other words, that never quite weave together to form anything. Until just a few years ago, any book I imagined publishing was going to be simply an “anthology.”
On the other hand, my debut book, Vessels (which is coming out in December), is very much a single integrated work with an extremely strong personality. It felt quite strange to suddenly produce something like this, after so many years of writing poetry without the slightest hope that I would ever be able to collect my work into something so cohesive as A Book. I have no idea whether my next book be the result of another “project” or “merely” an anthology. Or maybe I’ll write a cookbook.
How has putting together your first book for publication changed your writing? What have the differences been since?
The biggest change is that I had no idea what was next after Vessels, and I thought I needed to know, and this absolutely paralyzed me for several years.
After finishing the Vessels manuscript in the summer of 2021, I gave myself a break from writing, and instead focused on preparing the book for submission. But then the break became a hiatus, and I simply wasn’t hearing what should follow. The “voice” of my book had been very strong, and the process that produced it had been very overpowering; I couldn’t decide whether I should just keep writing in that same vein or turn and do something “new.”
As I was mulling over all of this, I decided to look back at my older material. I have more than thirty years’ worth of poems, or the equivalent of at least three books. For most of 2023, during the time I normally would’ve been writing or revising new work, I worked at preparing several presentable manuscripts. Some very old stuff I had long ago given up on as juvenilia, but now I looked at some of it as revisable, and which could have new life in new contexts.
And it finally dawned on me that I have never, in fact, had the slightest inkling of “what’s next,” so why should the impending emergence of my first published book have suddenly changed this? No matter what sort of book comes next, it won’t be what some readers of Vessels will want—it will either be too much like Vessels, or too different. And this has always been true: we all know this as fans when our favorite artist, band, or author releases a new thing and it’s too short or too long, too political or not political enough, too samey or too weird, or whatever. So I’ve never particularly cared what my readers wanted—and before them, when I was a songwriter, my listeners—because it’s pointless to try to chase peoples’ tastes. Why did I think I should I start now?
In the last few months, I’ve begun once again to (very very) slowly write new material. I am deliberately not looking ahead at whether any of this stuff is part of some new project or just lots of little solitary scraps. I’m not even asking if any of these scraps might be poems or not. That’s for later. For now, there are words in a notebook.
As for my actual process and the sort of things I write, I’m not sure if anything’s different from before. I work how I work, I write what I write. Maybe there’s something different, but I haven’t really been looking. Change, most of the time, is something you only notice after the change.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I’m generally the first to wake up in the morning. That early, dark hour or so when I have the house to myself is the main time for writing. But I’ve also found that the more committed I am to some sort of schedule (any sort—whether it’s for an hour before dawn, or ten minutes after lunch, or whenever—as long as it’s fairly consistent), the more likely I’ll also be able to grab a few random minutes here or there throughout the day.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
Two of my favorite lit mags are, unfortunately, now shuttered: Guesthouse (edited by Jane Huffman) and Otoliths (edited by Mark Young). Both were/are amazing in their scope and vision. (And, full disclosure, I was honored to be published in both of them.) Their archives are still online, thankfully, so they continue to be available for exploration.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
After Jerome Rothenberg died recently, I saw several references to his anthology Technicians of the Sacred. I tracked down a copy, and for the last few weeks, I’ve been reading it every morning as I make my coffee. I absolutely love how he organized and structured it.
I’m also working my way through H.D.’s Collected Poems. I suspect people familiar with her work might assume she was an influence on Vessels—especially Trilogy—but I had never actually read her until the summer of 2021, after I’d finished the manuscript.
Last month, I read Mark
Scroggins’s excellent biography of Louis Zukofsky, A Poem of a Life. Since
then, I’ve been revisiting Zukofsky’s poetry for the first time in maybe twenty
years, and rediscovering how much more influential he was for me than I’d
remembered.
Robert van Vliet’s poetry has appeared in The Sixth Chamber Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Wine Cellar Press, Otoliths, Guesthouse, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook This Folded Path (above/ground press 2023). His debut book of poetry, Vessels, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in December, 2024. He lives in St Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, Ana.
A selection of his poems appeared in the twelfth issue.