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An Interview with Christopher Bakken
Michael Levan conducted this interview with Christopher Bakken over a number of lengthy emails in September 2007, which hopefully didn't distract Dr. Bakken too much from his writing. He also encourages you to come to the Shaman Drum on October 2 to see his mentor read both translations of Titos Patrikios and from his own work.
Michael Levan is an MFA candidate in poetry at Western Michigan University.
Christopher Bakken is the author of Goat Funeral (2006) and After Greece for which he received the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry in 2001. He is also co-translator of The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He divides much of his time between Greece and Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife, Kerry Neville Bakken, and his two children, Sophia and Alexander. He teaches at Allegheny College.
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UpInMichigan.org: Let's start off with an easy one: what first drew you to the project of translating the work of Greek poet, Titos Patrikios?
Christopher Bakken: Early on, my collaborator suggested we experiment in translation with a handful of previously un-translated Greek poets. It was the voice of Patrikios (or perhaps the voice we found ourselves creating out of his Greek) that seemed most powerful and authentic to our sensibilities—we felt like we were discovering what he should sound like in English and so we decided to try our hand at a lot more of it. Of course, there was the added rush of being the first translators, creating a poet in English that other translators will probably correct, revise, and replace in the future (that is the nature of translation). But the thrill of bringing poems into English for the first time is analogous to the thrill I get when I bring my own poems into existence—with translation it's not quite ex nihilo, but it's close enough to give any language junkie like me a satisfying fix.
UpInMichigan.org: Patrikios actively participated in the resistance movement to the German occupation of Greece, was "displaced" to prison camps within the borders of his own country following the Greek Civil War, and later exiled to Paris and Rome from 1959-1964 and again from 1967-1975. How do you see think these experiences shaped his poetry?
Christopher Bakken: I once asked Titos what kind of poet he would have been if he'd been born in, say, Poughkeepsie in the early 20th century instead of Athens, if he'd never felt so acutely what Wallace Stevens called "the pressures of reality." His answer surprised me: he wasn't sure he would have become a poet. His law career would have probably intervened—that was the practical explanation. But there was another explanation that had to do with the necessity of his poetic impulse.
At first I thought Patrikios' poetry came out of the need to write against something (the occupying Germans, the censors, the Colonels, all the violence), but that's not it at all. In fact, it was the experience of all that terror that drove him to notice what was worth writing for, not to mention living for. Language—since it can express truth as well as propaganda and ugliness—was worth living for. Patrikios begins his career as a poet of praise at that level and he continues to be one even in the periods of his deepest irony and dissatisfaction. I'm not sure that kind of desperate praise would have seemed so necessary—poetry is a matter of self-preservation according to Stevens—if he hadn't had to go through his periods of imprisonment and exile.
UpInMichigan.org: The book description for The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios calls Patrikios a "poet of witness and engagement." This seems to be a particularly significant and reverential characterization for European poets, like Patrikios, Czeslaw Milosz, and Adam Zagajewski who was one of your teachers. Do you think European writers feel more responsibility to their history and current events than American writers do?
Christopher Bakken: This is a very complicated question, one that goes to the heart of what we mean when we toss around phrases like "political poetry." It has been pointed out by many critics (I think of Sven Birkerts' essay "‘Poetry' and ‘Politics'," for example) that Americans lack the "collective historical awareness" (Birkerts' phrase) Europeans are born with. There's an American ignorance and amnesia at work here, to be sure—when I ask my undergraduates to think historically they rarely reach back more than a few decades at a time. But it may also have to do with the fact that in an empire, which America is, there's nothing to threaten us, there's nothing to fear. History signals fear and warning for so many Europeans, which might be why they turn to it so responsibly in poems. Without that historical sense, American poets have the privilege (or curse) of turning inward, finding the "desert spaces" within.
That said, I do think we need to be careful not to attach too much value to phrases like "witness." We need to be careful not to confuse historical content with that quality of historical imagination we admire in our Greek and Polish friends. After all, what Robert Lowell witnessed inside his own mind was easily profound enough for great poetry. But Lowell also wrote with a tremendously broad historical sensibility. European poets needn't be given a monopoly on that kind of imagination, since it is truly available to all of us, even those of us who think we only encounter history on cable television.
UpInMichigan.org: Given Patrikios' themes and his politics, what do you hope a broader, contemporary, English-speaking audience will take from his poetry?
Christopher Bakken: It is the necessity of poetry that I spoke about earlier that seems important for American readers to encounter. Most of the poems I read in American literary magazines just don't seem to need to exist. I don't mean to suggest that American poets should be put before a firing squad or locked up on a prison island to qualify for poetry--though I might recommend that in certain cases.
But we live at a time when language is so threatened by untruth—especially at the level of politics—that it is good to be reminded how necessary it is for a poet's language to irritate and frustrate those who strive after a dilution of language. While some people work hard to make phrases like "war" with "peace-keeping" mean the same thing, poets like Patrikios work hard to remind us that it's a short journey from such equivocation to something really sinister.
UpInMichigan.org: I'm curious about how you worked with your translation collaborator, Roula Konsolaki. What kind of process did you go through as you tried to capture the essence of Patrikios' work without sacrificing the nuances of the Greek language? What were the difficulties in going back and forth between the two languages?
Christopher Bakken: After I've pushed my way, rather painfully (since I read Greek slowly and with great effort), through the original poem, Roula sends me an almost literal trot and I attack that with two things in mind: the Greek itself (which I still have open next to me at all times) and my own sense of what a poem in English must sound like. It's my job, as the poet, to bring the translated language in the direction of poetry at the very least. Then Roula gets to correct the moments when I do that too willfully—she tugs back in the direction of the literal, I tug back again, and we end up with a kind of compromise. It's a great way of working, I think. Perhaps it's ideal for a poet to work with a non-poet, actually. I'd worry that two poets might be more honest to their lyrical impulses than to any other concern.
UpInMichigan.org: How has spending this time translating someone else's work affected your own writing? Did Patrikios open up any new avenues for how you approach your poems?
Christopher Bakken: It did. Doing translation is a little like playing a duet with another poet, or at least that's how it feels to me. The aim is to wind up playing in the same key, if we follow the simile a little, and eventually even playing in the same style. Of course, since I work with Roula I'm technically part of a musical trio, but you get my point, I think.
In my latest book, Goat Funeral, there's a whole section of poems I call duets, all of them with dead poets I have not translated (Fernando Pessoa, Salvatore Quasimodo, and D.H. Lawrence, who doesn't need translation, obviously) but poets I wanted to play with, sing with, poets whose music meant something to me. These poems were not imitations exactly—I thought of them as attempts to see what would happen when my voice needed to harmonize with another poet's voice. It occurs to me, thanks to your question, that my impulse to write those duets probably happened because I was seeking more of the kind of creative pleasure I took from translating Patrikios.
UpInMichigan.org: Well, you're welcome for helping illustrate that point. I do try to help sometimes. But that does bring up a question I have regarding the duets: what about these particular poets lend themselves to giving you the inspiration to, as you say, "harmonize with another poet's voice"? Are you able to pick out what about their work called you to play these duets or was the process more organic than that?
Christopher Bakken: I think those poems did follow my writing process in a rather organic way. Writing poetry always comes out of reading poetry for me. I don't mean in some general sense....of course every poet reads to cull ideas and gather momentum. But I actually tend to work with a ziggurat of books in front of me, which I must push aside to make room for some blank paper of my own on the desk. I often consciously choose to surround myself with work that is quite different than my own—choosing foreign language poets is an obvious way to do that—the motive being to discover new musical scales and motifs, to shock me away from my usual noise.
This method of working might account for my penchant for allusion and in some cases outright theft—the reason a line by Larkin ends up being italicized and dropped into the middle of an eclogue, for example. In the case of my duets, I know that I began those days reading my way into Pessoa, Milosz, Lawrence, etc., and the poems arrived when I chose to make my normally silent dialogue with a dead poet audible.
Also, eclogues were originally duets—between shepherds, not living and dead poets—so I'm sure it's not a coincidence that these poems found me as I was making the series of twisted goat songs at the heart of my second book.
UpInMichigan.org: As you just mentioned, the second section of Goat Funeral features a series of eclogues, a kind of poem I don't naturally associate with contemporary poetry. What drew you to participate in the pastoral tradition? I wonder if you could also speak to the different forms in the series, ranging from tercets and a sonnet to a "Minimalist Eclogue."
Christopher Bakken: I had just moved from the fourth largest city in the United States, Houston, to rural Pennsylvania, where I befriended an Amish farmer, started up an organic vegetable cooperative, and spent my days stomping over pine needles and fallen leaves instead of the shattered crack vials and beer bottles of urban Texas. I grew up in the country, in rural Wisconsin, and it was a wonderful shock to my system to return to a landscape that was still pastoral in the most literal sense.
We live in an anti-pastoral age, which means that the choice to write pastoral poetry seems almost bombastically traditional, if not absurdly anachronistic. So obviously I didn't want to write idealized country-mouse poems, even if that is an oblique part of the pastoral tradition. For me, Virgil's eclogues are political poems: his shepherds—and these shepherds are poets, naturally—sit on the periphery of a society that is losing its way, which means they have the proper perspective to evaluate those losses. They are bawdy, debauched, and vituperative poems. If my sequence makes the eclogue contemporary in any way, this is probably the part of the tradition I was most interested in engaging, if not exaggerating.
Also, it didn't initially occur to me that pastoral poems could harbor such violence. These are certainly the most violent poems I've ever written. They were started in the fall of 2001 and were written in the shadow of the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, in the climate of bizarre fear and jingoism that accompanied all of that.
Now, the idea of a bumpkin singing-contest might seem rather limiting to deal with such an awful context, but Theocritus' and Virgil's eclogues are surprisingly flexible, open to expressions of brute anger, erotic energy, lamentation and satire. The various forms I selected to embody my eclogues were usually chosen to facilitate those different modes of expression. Rather than adopt and repeat a single form or stanza shape, which I contemplated doing, I permitted myself a kind of fragmentation in the sequence, at least at the level of style. I guess my shepherds are looking for a way to sing, in spite of the obstacles.
UpInMichigan.org: Do you see GF as a natural progression to your work in After Greece?
Christopher Bakken: A close friend told me that I simply could not follow up a book about Greece with a book of eclogues. It would mean that I was stuck in the ancient Mediterranean, permanently fossilized there, that my poetry would never recover. So, in that sense it is perhaps too natural a progression. But the books are so radically different that I no longer have many anxieties in that department. After Greece is written from a deliciously flawed heaven of my imagination; Goat Funeral begins in exile from that place, in a contemporary version of hell, and attempts to find its way back.
UpInMichigan.org: I'm also interested in how shaping the manuscript for GF differed from your first book? Did you have a pretty clear idea how you were going to structure it as the poems were being written, or was it much more of a mess than that?
Christopher Bakken: It was entirely a mess. What to do with this mountain of psychedelic shepherd poems? What to do with the little sequence of duets? Should I then just scatter the other unrelated poems haphazardly about, hoping they might mortar the thing together somehow? Should I scatter the eclogues about?
Stanley Moss, my editor at Sheep Meadow, saw the light and insisted that the eclogues had to come in sequence, and early in the manuscript. I knew I wanted my "Theme Song for an Agrarian Epic," to open the book, since it is at once tongue-in-cheek and entirely earnest in its rendering of a lost world—that of my grandfather's dairy farm in Wisconsin, the only "real" pastoral place I have known. And the second poem, "Anamnesis," is also a kind of gateway into the eclogues, with its funerary gestures and its conversation with Wordsworth.
And it seemed inevitable that the book would end back in Greece. So it does.
UpInMichigan.org: On the back cover of GF, your second volume of poems, Richard Howard writes, "This is the best second book of poems I've read in a decade." Of course these are very thoughtful and, I imagine, sincere words, but does this sort of proclamation play into any anxieties about coming up with poems for your next book that will live up to Mr. Howard's praise? Do you feel any pressure as you continue writing? Where do you see your poems going in the future?
Christopher Bakken: Obviously I am entirely flattered and a little stunned by Richard's praise, to a large degree because making a second book is such a weird process. When you are making your first book, since it's just a first manuscript for so long, possibly forever, you pour everything into it without much sense of what will follow. When you're making a second book there's always the question of how the new poems follow or converse with the old. I'm sure poets have a lot of stupid and needless anxiety about that—I know I did—when really we should just make poems, if we're able to make them at all, and be thankful for that.
But as that admonition by my friend suggested, I had the added problem of writing a strangely cohesive first book, a collection that was all about one thing: my idea of Greece. I mean, I really couldn't go on writing about Greece for the rest of my life, could I? There was that. Also, having written so many poems that worked around one consistent problem or idea, I was really anxious about whether I'd be able to just collect a bunch of poems "about" different things and call it a book. As it turns out, Goat Funeral has another long sequence at its center, so you can see that I did not have to be so brave after all.
As for pressure, the only pressure I want to feel is the desire to make more poetry. Poetry is now so weirdly institutionalized—it's become a business, if we believe AWP, though the practical stakes are so hilariously low—that the really important thing is to just put all the luck and drama of publication aside and remember to live for the work itself. A book of contemporary poetry has about as much impact as a cherry bomb in the Pacific, after all. Keeping that kind of perspective is important, I think.
UpInMichigan.org: That's a dismal thing for any writer to accept, no? Of course we can't expect to change the world with a book of poems, but there are countries where writers have been integral to change, where they've had more worth than a cherry bomb. Maybe even a Roman candle. What kind of advice do you give your undergraduates then as they apply to graduate programs and submit to journals, especially in light of writing being a field where you encounter rejection most of the time?
Christopher Bakken: You're right, and I'm sorry for sounding dismal. I think this is actually a question of faith. Clearly, I'm not against publication, but I am old-fashioned enough to think of poetry as a monastic discipline, as something sacramental that must be practiced regardless of the rewards. Taking the poetry-biz too seriously can quickly undermine that, since so much of it is fueled by ego. Because we live in a culture of fame and instant gratification, I suppose I over-compensate in this respect because I am a teacher, frequently dealing with students who arrive in my workshops with ideas they gleaned from Hollywood about the glories of literary fame.
I believe that poetry is part of the "high world" that Adam Zagajewski describes in his poem, "Self Portrait." The pursuit of that world keeps me writing, not the possibility of a Pushcart. There are no shortcuts.
So I tell them to accept rejection, even to court rejection by sending their work out a lot, and to get on with the writing no matter what. There are readers out there for whom the work might make a difference. Gertrude Stein used to say that she wrote for herself and strangers. The truth is, most of us write for ourselves and the small number of readers we hope might find their way to the poems, if we're determined and thick-skinned enough to get them into print.
UpInMichigan.org: Your first book is titled After Greece. You translated the work of Titos Patrikios, and GFcontains the aforementioned series of eclogues (a Romanization of the Greek eklegé, meaning "draft, choice, selection, reckoning") and poems titled "Anamnesis" and "Aegean: Flight 652." What is it about Greece that has you returning to its landscape and its language?
Christopher Bakken: At first, it was actually living there. Greece is entirely barren and entirely full at the same time. The years I spent in Greece removed me from myself entirely, stripped away so many layers of my Midwestern American being, allowed me to recreate myself and my poetry and my language from scratch, and then returned me to myself shaken and confused. I wrote the first book after leaving Greece, as the title suggests, trying to come to terms with what Greece had done to me.
And though my work is winding its way back toward the Midwest now, my continued involvement with translation and my continued attempts to keep an existence in Greece (I'm there at least once a year and much more often if I'm able) fortify me in ways I can only describe in the simplest terms. I feel at home there, for one thing. Attempting to master Greek, which for me will be impossible, keeps me aware of the fundamental mystery of language. It is the Promised Land of my literary imagination.
And I need water. I cannot begin to explain how much sustenance I receive from being in Greek water—swimming, diving, hunting octopus, dreaming there—the Aegean is my action-adventure paradise. I get very nervous when I stray too far from that sea. Living way across the Atlantic in America, then, I live in an almost perpetual nervous state.
I'm going to the island of Thassos in November to participate in this year's olive harvest. My friend Tassos owns about eighty acres of organic olives just steps from some of the most beautiful swimming on earth. I cannot imagine anything—other than reading—that will prepare me for poetry more than that.
UpInMichigan.org: Right now, what are the books and who are the writers you're most excited about reading?
Christopher Bakken: Since for the first time I'm really being pulled into poetry by the locale of my early life—the bizarre bucolic landscape of Wisconsin, in particular—I've been drawn to poets who have managed to write their way into such places. I'm a huge admirer of B.H. Fairchild, for example; Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest is a real beauty. And I've been returning with renewed attention to two poets who were crucial to me about twenty years ago: Theodore Roethke and James Wright.
Since I tend to keep one eye in a classical place at all times, I'm also dipping into Catullus and Horace a lot lately. They are both so elegant and so brutal and so hilariously raw. David Ferry's translations of Virgil were crucial to making the eclogue sequence in Goat Funeral and now his Horace is working on me as well.
There are certain poets I wait for—excited to find out what they'll make next. Geoffrey Hill and Derek Walcott are always worth waiting for. Of the ‘younger' poets, I'm eager to see more from Sarah Arvio, Joshua Mehigan, and Corey Marks. And I read my friend Alicia (A .E.) Stallings with great expectation as well, and not just because we have Greece in common.
UpInMichigan.org: This may be a question only of interest to a limited group, but I wonder how you and your wife Kerry Neville Bakken, also a prize-winning writer, are able to handle the challenges of teaching, writing, and taking care of your family. When I meet partners who are both writers, I'm intrigued by the balance of ambition, responsibility, and love it takes to be successful in all these facets. How do you accomplish this?
Christopher Bakken: To be truthful, we both spend a lot more time these days worrying about how to handle the challenges of parenting than anything else. We both have about three hours per week to dedicate to writing. Though we do occasionally get bookish together (that sounds appropriately raunchy, doesn't it?), we're like most married adults who sit around trying to figure out who is driving which kid to school the next day and who's buying yet another two gallons of organic milk on the way home from seminar.
But when we actually have new writing and we need a reader, neither of us search much farther than at home. Being in love doesn't prevent us from being terrific and sometimes prickly editors for one another—that she's got prose covered and I'm responsible for poetry keeps us balanced (I don't know if poets should be allowed to marry poets, really, though I have many friends who have done that quite successfully). More than anything, we both understand that writers need one thing: solitude. At this period in our lives, we help one another cope with the fact that that's exactly what we don't have much of. Diapers, bills, viruses—we've got a lot of those. The beautifully banal realities of family life, yes. Solitude, no.
So we're good at helping one another find a space to be writers in, protecting one another from the stuff that would prevent us from working. And we were both lucky enough to marry our greatest admirers.
UpInMichigan.org: So how do you maximize those three hours per week? Are you the type of writer who jots notes down during the week's brief moments of peace and then manages to get them to coalesce into a poem, or at least a draft of one?
Christopher Bakken: I work. Nose to the grindstone. Must make verse now. I arrive highly caffeinated, turn off the phone, refuse to answer the knocks on my office door, and hope for the best. I love the accidents that can happen when writing under such pressure, with the knowledge that this is the only chance for another week for something to get made. Three hours is not enough to produce a poem, mind you, but I'm happy if I end up with a promising series of lines, even a stanza, stuff I can pillage later.
At the initial level of composition, I'm primarily operating metrically, doing syllabic math, which might suggest that I work very slowly. The truth is, meter spurs me on more than it slows me down and I rely on it constantly to lead me into those accidents of language that come out of the rise and fall of English accents. Most of the lines that come to me in those brief moments of peace during the week arrive already decked out in dactyls, or some other metrical garb, and they are usually already at the writing party when I finally arrive there myself.
UpInMichigan.org: There's a tradition of asking writers about their connection to Michigan, whether or not they see themselves as "Michigan writers." Between being from the Midwest and having such a fondness for poets like Fairchild and Roethke, in particular, do you think there's something to being a "Midwestern poet," maybe even a certain badge of honor to it?
Christopher Bakken: There is a place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that is a kind of axis mundi for me: it's called Porcupine Mountain State Park, located on some preternaturally beautiful shoreline of Lake Superior. I used to drag my 1967 Pontiac Star Chief (loaded with friends, various contraband and illicit substances) up there once or twice a year for rather epiphanic camping adventures. And I went to several hockey camps in Michigan...which is all a way of arguing that I might as well be a Michigan poet.
My relatives in Northern Wisconsin have a series of jokes they tell about the "U-Pees," making fun of their Michiganish neighbors and their bumpkin accents in particular. Mind you, such jokes are delivered in the most heinous Northern Wisconsin accent imaginable, proving that Wisconsin and Michigan are really part of the same continuum, connected at the very least by a shared obsession with beer, dairy products, and football. Oh....all that plus a penchant for killing things out in the woods.
There's a hilarious story, spilled into my ear more than once by one of its protagonists, Richard Howard. It goes like this: James Merrill and Richard Howard get invited, who knows why, to a conference in North or South Dakota and are put on a panel with a number of Midwestern poets, including James Dickey. Clearly, Howard and Merrill don't quite jive with the proceedings, for reasons one hardly needs to explain. At some point, Merrill turns to Howard and whispers, "so this is what happens when the Great Fancies meet the Great Plains."
I'm fascinated with the way that American poets, spread out as they have been across the vastness of North America, manage to write their way into a regional style. We just don't expect a Minnesota poet to write like someone in the New York school. We tend to associate the "golden style" with the East Coast and the "plain style" with the carbohydrate belt. Perhaps that's because we associate the Midwest with certain unpretentious qualities that we might mistake for virtues: straightforwardness, clarity, candor, earnestness, a suspicion of irony, even masculinity. But then you think about the masters of the "plain style" and when you begin to list them--James Wright, Philip Levine, Ronald Wallace, B.H. Fairchild, William Stafford, Theodore Roethke—we see how facile those assumptions become. None of these poets can be reduced down so easily and most were deeply enriched by entirely non-Midwestern things, namely the traditions of Spanish and French poetry. And the greatest American master of the plain style was Robert Frost. Though for political reasons I'd like to claim Vermont and New Hampshire for the Midwest (I mean, they seem more Midwestern to me than Texas, which is just in the middle of the West, with apologies to Pete Fairchild...), he's a New England poet through and through.
You see that there's an awful lot here for a Wisconsin poet to ramble on about. My Midwest is the lunatic northern fringe—those blue states hugging up along the Great Lakes. I was raised in Madison, which people referred to as the "Berkeley of the Midwest" (our city was known for its witches, its Birkenstocks, and its excellent marijuana). That place has more in common with New York and California than one might think, being on its own kind of coast. But unlike the oceanic coasts, in the Midwest a sense of homestead and frontier still informs the way we are and the way we think. The defining characteristic of the Midwest for me is its comfortable isolation, a prairie solitude that turns brutal hockey players like me into poets. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, educated in New York City, Greece and Houston, and cannot entirely account for how I happened. But I am positive that the Midwest had everything to do with it.
UpInMichigan.org: Thanks for your time, Christopher.
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