DCW: I don’t know if you have ever seen Nardwuar’s
interviews, but he always leads with this question, which I think is an
important one: Who are you?
JG: Who am I?
That’s an impossible question to answer.
Let me explain what I can’t explain: I did my
dissertation on the sense of the self in contemporary American literature. The focus was on the postmodern notion that
there is no definable self. I can not
explain who I am nor can I explain who you are.
All I can give you is a sense of my self that is a fiction I’ve created
or agreed to, or in part created and agreed to. Likewise, I can’t tell you who
you are. You are a fiction I’ve created
based on the bits and pieces of you I know.
So who am I?
I’m a 71-year old guy with bad knees, vertigo, eyes
that go in and out of focus, polyps in my left nostril, arthritis in my elbows,
two broken feet that never heeled properly.
I’m also a writer who writes poems, novels, and essays
about stuff that has nothing to do with all that.
I write about snow and
sparrows, the world in the morning, the world at night, the friends who are
still here and wondering where I’ve gone to, and the friends who are waiting in
their graves for my memories to give them some breath.
I write about God and
aging, my wife and my family, the way a door closes and the way a door waits to
be opened.
I write a lot about my
mom and dad, the lives they had after they left the concentration camps.
I write about standing
at a bus stop in Chicago in the pearly gray rain waiting for a passing
crucifixion just the way I did when I was a kid 50 years ago.
So who else am I?
I’m also still what I
once was: a kid born in a refugee camp after WWII, growing up in a Polack
neighborhood in Chicago, listening to my mother tell me how she saw her mother
raped and killed by the Germans, dreaming of Walt Whitman and Dostoevsky,
listening to my father telling me about how he watched German soldiers ripping
the breasts off women with their bayonets, reading everything there was, going
to schools and colleges and failing until I didn’t, dreaming with Kerouac on
the roads I took, finding friends and losing friends, teaching and marrying and
having a family like no family I had ever had, and growing and growing and
growing.
And still that’s not
who I am. It’s just a story I tell my
self.
Just yesterday, a
friend I had in 6th grade got in touch with me on Facebook. I haven’t spoken or written to this guy in
like 60 years. I asked him who I was in
6th grade. He wrote back,
“You were a tall, skinny, bad boy.”
I was surprised. I think he had me confused with someone
else. Or not.
DCW: You taught at the collegiate level for a few
years. I think I remember you mentioning that at times you used to commute by
plane. Can you tell us how teaching has informed you as a human being? What
about your craft? How has teaching informed your writing, or vice versa?
JG: I started teaching in a university as a grad
student in 1973 and finished as a full professor in 2013. 40 years.
How did that inform me as human being?
I think the most profound influence was on how I interact with
people. I was a shy kid. I didn’t like to talk, didn’t like to put
myself forward. Part of this I think
came from being an alien, a foreigner, a person who wasn’t from around
here. I was the outsider, I couldn’t
speak English, didn’t know shit from Shinola when it came to being an American,
didn’t know about pilgrims or Independence Day or Bing Crosby or Aunt
Jemima. And my parents were even
worse. The way I reacted to all of this
was to pull back, hold back. I didn’t like
to talk to people, didn’t like to tell them what I was thinking or what the
weather was like or what time it was because if I did they might recognize how alien
I really was.
Somehow I found myself teaching, and teaching forced
me to talk and to tell people what I thought I was thinking. Just like this. Without all those years of teaching what I
would be writing right now wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be reading
it. I wouldn’t even know who you were or
who the fuck I was.
Ditto with the craft.
Spending 40 years reading what writers wrote opened me to the
possibility I could put words down on a paper that would somehow explain all
the stuff I couldn’t explain. The great
writers I was reading always seemed to know what was going on in the world they
were turning around and around in. And I
wanted to be that kind of person too.
Making sense for a moment of everything.
DCW: How important is travel to a writer, poet,
artist? How has travel helped to shape your point of view?
JG: Travel – if you’re paying attention while you’re
doing it – will teach you one of the most important lessons you can learn as a
writer. You are a stranger, and you are
not a stranger. You’re in the story you
are living, and you are not in the story you are living. When I travel, I am always looking for what I
don’t know, have never experienced, but what I always realize is that what I
don’t know is in fact part of what I know.
I think a lot of this in some way reaches back to
where I came from. I wasn’t born
here. I was born in a refugee camp in a
country (Germany) where my parents had been enslaved in concentration camps
because they were considered subhuman. I
was a stranger in Germany, and a stranger here in the US. Traveling now – and I travel a lot – reminds
me I’m a stranger.
How does this impact my writing? If I didn’t feel like a stranger, I probably
would never write, probably I wouldn’t see the point of writing. I would just assume that my views and ideas,
my vision, was just like the vision everyone else has; and then what would be
the point of writing it down.
DCW: Do you believe in inspiration? What keeps you
coming back to the work?
JG: I absolutely believe in inspiration, the muse that
speaks to me. When I first started
writing, I thought the idea of a muse was just a gag, some bullshit left over
from the Greeks. But then I met a
terrific poet named Gray Jacobik who said, “Listen to your muse.” And I thought she was kidding me too, but she
wasn’t. She believed all writers and
artists have a muse, someone who speaks to them.
I finally came to believe it after that. What I noticed was that thoughts and words
were always popping into my head, and I didn’t know where they were coming
from, but there they were, and I had to write them down immediately because the
muse wasn’t going to whisper twice what she whispered once.
Is the muse real?
I don’t know, but what I do know is that I have to listen to this voice
and write down everything that it says to me because some of this stuff is
really really good.
By the way, I wrote a poem of advice to a creative
writing class once and it touches on the idea of muses, and here’s the last
stanza:
Fourth,
find a muse. I’m not kidding. Mine is a mother
of
two who died in the snow outside of Stalingrad,
shot
in the forehead by a German foot soldier
from
a little town in Bavaria. She comes to
me
when
I’m busy grading papers or talking with friends
and
she begs me to remember her children, all the children.
What
will this muse do for you? Ask her,
she’ll tell you.
DCW: Who were some of your favorite writers to teach?
Who are some of your favorite writers to read? Why?
JG: My favorite writers to teach are pretty much my
favorite writers to read.
My favorite poets are: Whitman, Dickinson, Robert
Frost, Tadeus Rozewicz, Milosz, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, Ai,
Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Donald Hall, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
My favorite prose writers are: Toni Morrison, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Saul
Bellow, Kerouac, Emerson, and Paul Theroux.
Why do I like them?
I like serious, gloomy writers. I like writers who talk about everyday things
too, tools and hammers, car parts, branches and limbs of trees, the way a head
turns when a person feels too much sun on the back of his neck.
When I was teaching creative writing, I always was
telling students to make sure their writing had everyday things in them, things
like hands and arms, feet and lips in them.
Someone recently asked me what good writing was and what good writing
wasn’t. There’s a long answer and a
short answer. The long answer involves
criteria and personal biography, the short answer involves a simple
statement. Here’s the short answer. What I feel is “good” is what touches
me. All the writers I mentioned above
touched me, shaped me, mothered and fathered me.
Here’s a poem I wrote about reading that tries to get
to the heart of this:
What
Reading Means to Me
Sometimes,
you’ll be sitting in a car
Reading
a novel you’ve read before
Waiting
for your wife or husband
To
get done with the shopping
And
you come to a part
About
something so close
To
you that you feel the writer –
Even
if she’s making it up –
Must
have in some past life
Lived
that moment you lived
In
some life, lived a pain
So
hard you want to take
The
writer’s hand and hold it
Against
your own chest
And
say nothing.
DCW: We’ve chatted about music a bit. Why do you think
music is such a powerful avenue for self-expression? Do you see a relationship
between poetry and music? What do they do for each other?
JG: I tend not to draw lines between the different
types of art. Music, poetry, prose, art,
photography, dancing, movies, theater?
All of them wash over me and clean me and shake and spruce me up and get
me moving toward the next moment and the next word. It’s always been this way for me since I was
a kid. One moment I would be reading a Spiderman
comic and the next minute I would be reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment and the next minute I would be listening to Son House sing Dead
Letter Blues and the next minute I would be humming the Midnight Sonata
and staring at a painting by Salvador Dali or Monet.
I love to sing and I love to shout out my poems and I
love to watch a movie or a TV show that is like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
But I know that not everything feels this way, and
when I think about the power of music I think a lot of that power comes because
music is the first art form we’re introduced to. Before a kid reads a book or watches a TV
show or anything, he’s probably listened to his mother sing a lullaby, and he’s
heard his dad singing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” or “Heartbreak Hotel.” And the kid will carry this music and this
memory through his life, and he’ll listen to every single song to see if it
evokes the memory of his mom singing a song about a deep well and the little
girl peering into it. And even when he’s
on his deathbed the kid will be thinking of that song, remembering it like it’s
the passageway to heaven and soon he’ll be hearing her sing it again.
DCW: What does the writing process look like for you?
Where does a poem “begin”? How do you know when a poem is “finished”?
JG: The writing process pretty much looks the same all
the time. I hear a phrase in my head, a
combination of a few words or phrases, and I like the sound or the image or the
thought, and I write it down. Sometimes,
if I’m lucky, as soon as I start writing the phrase I heard in my head, it will
lead me to another phrase and another phrase and another phrase. I don’t try to force it. I just try to let the words lead me to where
they want me to go.
If I’m lucky, I’m finally sitting there at my desk
looking at about a dozen lines, or 20 lines, and I’m pretty happy with what
I’ve got.
What follows is generally a slower process of revision
and playing with the poem. When I was
teaching creative writing, I used to tell students that editing wasn’t editing,
it was really experimenting. When you
make a change to a poem, you’re experimenting with it, playing with it, trying
to see what else you can do. Sometimes
this process takes a couple days, sometimes longer.
How do I know I’m finished? When the poem sounds right. When I can read the poem out loud and it
feels fluid and like it came from me immediately without hesitation or any kind
of editing, that’s when I know it’s finished.
DCW: Thank you for your time, John. I truly appreciate
it. Is there anything else you would like the people to know?
JG: The only other thing I want to tell people is that
they shouldn’t get discouraged when their poems don’t seem to work or they can’t
find an audience. Even if you are the
only one reading your poems, they are still working, still doing their job on
you the writer, opening you up to what’s inside you in a way that will make you
happier and happier with your creativity as the years go on.
Remember that always, and buy one of my books. Thank you.
John Guzlowski's writing appears
in Rattle, North American Review, and other journals. Echoes
of Tattered Tongues, his memoir about his parents’ experiences as slave
laborers in Nazi Germany, won the Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric
Hoffer/Montaigne Award. He is the author of three novels and a columnist
for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.
