An Interview with Rodney Jones

Interviewer: Lee Rossi


Rodney Jones is the author of nine books of poetry. Born in rural Alabama, a place “that resembled much of the present third world, essentially feudal, agrarian, unelectrified,” his poems delight in the stories and language of his youth. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award, for which he received $100,000. He has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. For the past twenty-five years he has taught at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale. As the judges for the Griffin Trust award acknowledged, “There are not many poets who get as much of American life in their poems as Rodney Jones.”

LR: There’s a funny moment in “The Limousine Bringing Isaac Bashevis Singer to Carbondale” where you observe “professors of this and that…trotting out those tumors of erudition and septic ego they like to pose as questions.” Although I am not a professor, I’m afraid I may be about to afflict you with “tumors of erudition and septic ego.” Do you think academia is more of a spiritual Superfund site than, say, corporate America?

RJ: Was it Kissinger who said that the fights in academia were so intense because there was so little to fight over? Professors of this and that can turn into attack dogs, it’s true, and it can be cruel, but also funny and forgivable. Certainly, no one is exempt from bitterness. It is the great hope for enlightenment that distinguishes academia and the fall from that height that makes a part of it a spiritual Superfund site. The halls are full of literary theorists who have decided that they should have been executives. As for corporate America, I’ve been in its offices only a few times. Once, in the offices of the Northern Bank and Trust Company, I saw a woman reading Flaubert, perhaps secretly despairing that her earlier rush on the superconductor market had not been a paragraph in her novel.

LR: Some poets do their feeling in the poems and their thinking in their prose. But you seem to be able to combine both in your poetry. Is that why you haven’t written a book of essays, a memoir, or even one of those omnipresent how-to books?

RJ: We all do what we can, I suppose. God knows, I’ve written a number of essays over the years, and not presented them, often because the essays have not seemed sufficiently emotional. As for poetry, I’ve only been able to think of it as capacious. Many of my favorite poems are, in fact, essays—works by Ammons, Hass, Kirby, Perillo, C.K. Williams, Goldbarth—and a few—Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” for one—would even qualify as fiction. I love the large and small potential of the poetic form. Often I’ve thought of the possibility of placing a parenthetical novel between the second and third line of a haiku.

LR: Your poems often display nostalgia for a rural lifestyle which has been inundated by the modern world, one of those drowned valleys lost to dam builders and electrification. Several generations ago a group of poets from Vanderbilt took up the cause of the agricultural South, calling themselves the Fugitives. Do you see yourself as an inheritor of that group?

RJ: Let me introduce a minor objection to your question. I knew the rural life as a child and saw the agrarian culture turn to an industrial culture. Maybe what I have written is elegiac; certainly much of it means to conserve what has vanished or is vanishing, people and places—but nostalgia, no, I don’t think so, not often anyway. Don’t confuse me with that guy. From the first, I wanted to be freed from the hardscrabble, the hoe and picksack, the hayloft and corn-pulling, and, also, from the fundamentalism, the racism, the narrow sexual mores. I had an argument with the South, and I made it across the river.

I’m interested in the southern poets who aren’t ostentatiously “southern”: David Kirby, for instance, or A.R. Ammons, as much as the more emphatically “southern” masters such as Dave Smith or Ellen Voigt or Charles Wright. My southern identity is divided then, a little like a poem that I remember reading years ago in the New York Quarterly, “A Conversation between Jimmy Stewart and John Ashbery.” Of the Fugitives, Warren is the great poet, inventing a new rhythm with each book. I read him again and again. Tate, who was my teacher for a short period, is nearly always brilliant, and Ransom is unparalleled for his use of interesting diction.

LR: You have a lovely sardonic poem about Thoreau in which you make fun of the great man’s failed agrarianism, his “dry cow” and “cornstalks splintered by hail.” Have you ever tried to farm? Or is this just a dig at intellectuals who talk a good talk but can’t walk it? Does this apply to the Fugitive/Southern Agrarian group at Vanderbilt?

RJ: As I may have suggested earlier, I haven’t given much thought to the Southern Agrarian group since I was a sophomore at the University of Alabama. And how did I see that group? Rousseau, crossed with the English Romantics, but a little too associated with a lower political discussion that had some racist and classist tones that I found deplorable even as a child. The best writers in that group quickly went beyond “I’ll Take My Stand,” and my near contemporary, Wendell Berry, strikes me as a much more interesting writer on agrarianism. Though I’ve never told him, “Thoreau,” which sparked when a cold drop of motor oil fell on my head as I was replacing the rear seal in an old Volvo, was my friendly way of poking fun at him, and Thoreau, and myself.


LR: What about the Southern gothic? Is Jim Dickey one of your heroes? How about McCullers and O’Connor?

RJ: I don’t feel the sort of affiliation that Cormac McCarthy, for instance, feels with the horrific or gloomy subject, and I don’t feel a particular identity with the Southern gothic, but any subject matter is fine with me as long as I find the writing compelling. The folks you mention are all fine writers: McCullers occasionally; O’Connor nearly always; and, yes, I do have a special affection for the poetry that Dickey wrote between 1958 and 1968, not because of its philosophy, but because of its majesty, its lyrical and narrative brilliance. Poems like “The Sheep Child” and “May Day Sermon” were for me and for others in my culture no less than portals. They showed us how our experience could be transformed into literature.

Certainly, at times, Dickey became the worst sort of naturalist, who not only recognized nature red in tooth and claw, but also sought to create the experience that proved that vision: the big dude surviving, goddammit, by killing the little feller. That is disturbing to little fellers like myself, but the wholesale dismissal of Dickey by many of my contemporaries is shameful. Contrary to popular belief, literary genius is not necessarily equivalent to moral genius, and it is far rarer.

LR: I seem to be especially drawn to your satirical and sardonic poems. “The Blasphemy,” for instance, is a compelling and complex portrait of fundamentalist fervor. A girl you have designs on attacks you with a number 2 lead pencil after you’ve given “a whiny, lisping impression of a radio preacher she must have loved.” The poem spends a good deal of time focusing on the gulf between the skeptical narrator and the infuriated believer, but then the girl notices the blood and contritely cleans and bandages your wound. Finally, we see the narrator walking home along familiar streets where “the steeple of each church raised like a beneficent weapon.” Is mockery the only weapon reasonable people have against unquestioning belief?

RJ: I like to think of poetry as a protectorate more than a weapon, a territory where secret doubts and questions and blasphemies may be given voice and find company. This is one of the fundamental luxuries of the western poet, but not a natural right. As for the blasphemy in my poem, it is only a kind of schoolboy’s spitwad thrown against unquestioning belief. The stronger weapon is education, and not just a scientific, economic, and mathematical education, but the kind of broad philosophical education that leads one to question any ideology or belief. It is crucial that people who understand how to make nuclear weapons also understand the fabrication of myth.

LR: Over the years you’ve received generous, well-deserved praise for the warmth and humanity, as well as the down-to-earth readability, of your poems. I’ve yet to find an adequate appreciation of your scathing, sardonic humor or your gift for satire. Do you think critics are missing something, or am I just imposing my own curmudgeonly sensibility on your work?

RJ: Thank you for bringing such attention. I notice sometimes, as I am putting together a book, that a sort of strange conversation takes place between the numerous philosophical poems of absurdity and the post-romantic, post-pastoral lyrics and think it odd that they do not quarrel, but rather go along side by side like old horses. Perhaps many of my appreciators and critics just see that they are old horses.

LR: I have a friend here in California who’s a big fan of yours. A historian by trade, he’s quite taken with the vernacular quality of your poems and how they dramatize the perspective of the ordinary person. “United States” from Salvation Blues, in fact, is one of his all-time favorite poems. He compares the soft-spoken, sharp-tongued persona in your poems to Paul Newman’s characters in Hud and Cool Hand Luke. What do you think about that?

RJ: When I start to write, a number of people want to speak. Perhaps they are versions of people that I have known or read, and one of them is certainly that character that Paul Newman played in Cool Hand Luke, who seems a close relation, a what-the-hell kind of guy, a down to earth existentialist. When I wrote “The United States,” I was thinking of that Ashbery poem about the United States that begins, “Is anything central?” Ashbery, like Berryman or Gluck, interests me because the poems are polyvocal. The stoic and the romantic undermine each other. I need that sort of complexity of voice and perspective. At the same time, as Milosz has suggested, the challenge is to be only one person. I suspect that each of us might be many poets, but only one can do the job, and that poet is helpless, full-tilt-boogie, no other way to say it.

LR: In “First Coca-Cola,” you jump rather unexpectedly from the misgivings of your Baptist neighbors about Coke (“toy likker, fool thing”), to the electrocution of a miscreant named Edwin Dockery, and finally to a perplexed rumination on sin, pleasure, and human longing. The poem ends with the line, “I am never satisfied,” which in its rhythm and ruefulness, seems to echo James Wright’s declaration that “I have wasted my life.” Do you see the poem as a criticism of blue-nosed Baptism or as an admission that human nature is, as the Baptists claim, fallen and in need of redemption.

RJ: I was playing in that poem with the magic of carbonation, just that, and presto—the fizz seemed to cross a boundary, so I heard the sound of the electric chair and connected to something else, an abstract thought about American Puritanism and its link to violence. The poem came out as a sort of byproduct of that meditation. I’m pleased that you made the connection with James Wright, which I had not seen, but which must be there, as I have lived so deeply in his work that he is woven into my DNA.

LR: In “The Troubles that Women Start Are Men,” the narrator describes going with his father to view the scene of a murder. Nothing much happens. The father and the murderer talk about crops and weather and family. Meanwhile other neighbors arrive, many of them with their “grown boys.” For the narrator, however, the moment is a rite of passage from the dullness of childhood into the magic of adult life. The narrator concludes, “Whatever I’d dream, the world is not a lie.” In your opinion, what is it that the boy learns about life and about being a man?

RJ: Twice my father took me to murder scenes: once to the scene in the poem that you mention in your question, and another time to a wooded area where Dockery had left the body of the man he murdered. I was not traumatized in either case, but, later, it struck me as more than strange, and I still do not know why he did it—perhaps because I was such a bookish kid, and to his mind, living dangerously in my imagination. He wanted me to see that, in the place where we lived, there might be final consequences. But, of course, that’s perhaps too rational. Horror is always a draw.

LR: In “Mortal Sorrows” (from Things That Happen Once), you give us a fascinating list of sufferers and suffering—some of it physical, some of it not—all of it presented to the good country doctor, who listens, takes down symptoms, then scratches, “His temple’s meaningful patch of white,” before writing a prescription for barbiturates. There’s comedy here, but also pathos: the narrator says, “Still I want someone/ To see…that someone/ Listened and, hearing the wrong at the heart,/ Named it something that sounded real.” Do you think the poet’s task, giving witness to the lives and sorrows around him, is analogous to the doctor’s? Is there any comfort in poetry?

RJ: I was proud to receive several letters from doctors telling me how that poem described something essential about the practice of medicine, but at the same time it disturbed me, a little like the time a friend told me that he sometimes questioned why he had wanted to be a doctor, but then was consoled by the thought of all the beautiful bodies that he got to see.

As you rightfully suggest, the poem is partly about poetry—which has always given comfort, not only because it is vision-affirming, but also because the words themselves are charms, as are the beautiful names of diseases and medicines. I didn’t name my son Typhoid or my daughter Malaria, but it was a thought.

LR: Reading “Life of Sundays,” which presents an agnostic’s ambivalence toward old-time religion, I immediately think of Philip Larkin’s wonderful poem, “Church Going.” But whereas Larkin’s church is abandoned, yours is full of “widows, bankers, children, and ghosts.” Was the Larkin poem perhaps a model for your own?

RJ: No one could read “Church Going” and not be astonished. And it was more than a little daunting to enter that territory. I think it was it Eudora Welty or maybe Flannery O’Connor who said something like, “When one hears the Faulkner Express coming, one knows to get off the tracks.” While I did not consciously use Larkin’s poem as a model (and I was equally not consciously using Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”), our concerns as respectful non-believers are clearly related. I would suspect that I grew up in a more church-centered culture than Larkin, and that’s why the people are there. As for the ghosts, Sundays haunt me. Agnostics do have superstitions. I wrote the poem for purely personal reasons. Sunday was and will always remain personal with me. No matter how many people tell me differently, Sunday is not the first day of the week, but the last.

LR: In “Beautiful Child,” you describe a fairly typical event in the life of a three-year-old, the ritual tossing in the air, from which vantage point the child is able to discern a highly unflattering overview of adulthood:

Spinning near the rainspot continents
And the light globe freckled with flies…
I could smell the week-old syrupy sweat
And the kerosene of many colognes.
I could see the veined eyes and the teeth
Dotted with shreds of lettuce and meat.

At the end of the poem we find the child, having escaped the adults, in the crawlspace beneath the house. The poet comments: “I happily took myself into the darkness/ Of the underground, where I was king.”

If the darkness of the underground is your metaphor for poetry, do you think all or most poets find nourishment in isolation and the unconscious?

RJ: One of the primary contradictions of human behavior must be our simultaneous desire for affection and distaste for being worshipped. The excessive physical affection lavished on the beautiful child morphs to the excessive attention that a young man pays to a young woman’s breast. God only knows, to be an object of affection is to vanish. At the same time, the consolations of solitude include not only necessary self-nourishment, but also nostalgia for that lost physical affection. The feelings that I’m speaking of were the outer limits of a meditation that rose from various experiences, but the primary magnet was the necessity of establishing one’s own ground. I did not think of the underground as a metaphor for poetry (though it may well be, as metaphor seems almost arbitrary in its implication). I was actually thinking of a fruit cellar dug out under an old house we lived in when I was a tot, but I liked the complicating resonance of “underground.”

LR: One of the few black people in your poems (I take it that he was black because he was “a slave’s son and maybe a slave himself”) is Bird Wilheit, who worked for many years for your grandparents. Despite what we think we know about Southern racism, there is no hint in the poem that your grandparents think less of him or more of themselves because he is black. It is a complex, nuanced portrait of race relations. Can you tell us some more about how your view of race relations in the South differs from the usual George Wallace, Bull Connors narrative?

RJ: There are a number of black people in my poems and some of them are identified as black. Don’t worry, it is easy, from a distance, to mistake black people for white people. You know things like that when your name is Rodney Jones. When Transparent Gestures won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Washington Post writer reported that Rodney Jones wrote poems about “growing up black in the South.” At times, that was almost true. I lived in both the black and white cultures, but unlike Roman and Clifton Orr, I did not have to get up at 5AM to catch the bus to the one black school in the county.

It is difficult, I would imagine, to say anything fresh about race relations. When I was a junior high student, the civil rights movement was in full blossom, and my nickname was Martin Luther because I was the only kid in my class who spoke out constantly for integration, but, while that small stand gives me pride, it invokes no special privilege. Race relations are still fucked up in the South and in the United States and in most of our hearts and minds, no matter our heritage. If we don’t hate on each other in a xenophobic way, we love each other in a false way that removes criticism from the picture. For a take on racial relations that differs from the George Wallace, Bull Connors narrative, I would point to “Winter Retreat: Homage to Martin Luther King,” “Pussy,” “One Music,” and “Small-Lower-Middle-Class White Southern Male.”

LR: In a number of the poems from Things That Happen Once, we see the narrator measuring himself, the once beautiful child, against his elders: his grandparents, the poet Cesar Vallejo, his father-in-law (“The Commander”). What have you accepted from that rich and complicated past and what have you rejected?

RJ: It is essential that I accept it all, not as burden or legacy, but as something final, which won’t be changed, and which I need to understand in order to live with any real joy.

LR: In the poem entitled “Sex,” you describe an early enthusiasm for the work and worldview of D.H. Lawrence, yet the poem also includes a loving, or at least respectful, description of young Baptists weeping “onto the altar cloth/ Less because they are admissions of guilt/ Than because they are truly elegies for promiscuity.” Ultimately, you seem to be saying, we all wind up lamenting our lost promiscuity. And yet, at the very end of the poem—and this is a hallmark of your abundant and unflagging optimism—you insist on a fundamental similarity between Lawrence and Baptist eschatology: “All that I love was founded on the same premise/ As heaven: that pleasure lasts longer than death.” Is that the problem with Baptists (and Lawrentians), that they fail to see how similar they are to even their diametrical opposites?

RJ: How wonderful and essentially ineffable is the experience of sex. It comes up in our poetry most frequently, not as a subject, but as an erotic manner with language. Roland Barthes wrote about this, and Robert Hass has embodied it in nearly every one of his best poems. As for Lawrence, he made the effort to empathize with the inner sexual lives of women, even though, as readers and practical people, we know that no man can know what a woman feels—that bridge cannot be crossed except through fiction, and, for Lawrence, the other side of the bridge was ooga booga, surrender—“Please carry me away warrior stud. Strip me of identity. Let me become the thunder, the river, the wind.”

It may be true that women lose their identity in sexual encounters. I open the idea and sniff it (I find it, not only in Lawrence, but in poems by Neruda such as “Girl Gardening”), but I cannot digest it. In fact, I once wrote a poem called “For Whoever Told D.H. Lawrence,” questioning his vision of female sexual imagination. Perhaps predictably, it was a terrible poem. For a notation of female sexual experience, I go to Olga Broumas or Lee Anne Roripaugh or Louise Gluck. In general, female writers seem to have a leg up on male writers in their capacity to write about sexuality. But I make the effort in “Sex” to put something down on paper that represents my experience of sex and its peculiar, aged, moral angel. As for the problem with Baptists and Lawrentians, I trust that sex is sufficient to override the differences.

LR: You play guitar, I understand, and you’ve written at least two lovely poems about blues guitarists. In “Homage to Mississippi John Hurt,” for instance, you write, “I do not like to sing, but sing, driving home from work, sing to heal the language of its long service as a tool.” What is it about the instrument and the tradition that you find compelling in this hip-hop techno world?

RJ: What did Stevens say? Music is feeling, not sound? Poetry aspires to that, and while nothing of language ever comes up to Brahms or the best of George Benson, the best poetry touches the hem of that garment. The music of human language may be more telling than the more forthright announcement of meaning.

LR: In one of your newer poems, “The Masters,” you talk about the burden of history, specifically the burden of literary history, and acknowledge that, “When I began someone had already described all the thoughts that might be suggested by roots.” In fact, you say that “No pixel of the ideal page/ was not black with the traffic/ of iambs, spondees, and double dactyls.” Given the pressure to “make it new,” how is a young poet to proceed or even get started?

RJ: As my friend Allison Joseph so aptly puts it, “Read, write, repeat.” One has to love poems, love them enough to copy them down by hand, feel them, and seek the power that generated them. Learning to write poetry is not so different from learning to play music. One has to learn songs by heart and to noodle, to experiment, to push the boundaries. Eventually it is necessary, I think, to write recklessly, as though there were no precedent and no alternative.

LR: You’ve written poems for four decades now. Yet, in “A Defense of Poetry” you seem to question the whole enterprise of writing poetry. You say, “Why trouble the things you have heard or seen written/ when you can look at the madrone tree?” But for forty years you’ve taken the trouble. Why?

RJ: For many, not just myself, poetry is our great pumpkin. Of course I question poetry, its limited place in our larger culture, even the condition of its issue and uses, but there is in poetry a consciousness found nowhere else. My greatest disillusionment has come from my inability to register why poetry is not central in everyone’s life. It has transformed my most profound suspicions into knowledge and comforted me in humiliation and doubt. In “A Defense of Poetry,” I am asking, as politely as I can, for people who hate poetry to leave it alone, to look at the madrone tree.

LR: How did you choose the poems for Salvation Blues, your new and selected? I notice that you didn’t seem to include anything from your first two books, Going Ahead, Looking Back and The Story They Told Us of Light.

RJ: I saw the poems in those two early books as mostly apprentice works, and I was less interested in tracing a trajectory than presenting a sample of the best. In retrospect, there were poems that I left out that I wish I had included: “The Privacy of Women,” for instance, or “My Manhood,” but, also, as I labored to put that book together, I kept looking for poems that were not there, the poems that I had meant to write. I mean to write them still.

LR: Also, with regard to Salvation Blues, you said, “The new poems make me uncomfortable. They seem aesthetically and politically unflinching, statements of my depression and disgust with the people of the United States.” Have recent political events—for example, the election of President Obama—made you any less disgusted with the people of the United States?

RJ: That statement that I made makes me as uncomfortable as the poems, though it was no doubt true. Yes, the election of Obama does bolster and fortify my hopes, but, at the same time, our country was not Bush, and it is not Obama. We are, as we have always been, an ongoing discovery, an experiment.

LR: What are you currently working on? Do you have a new book coming out soon?

RJ: Some of your questions actually anticipate some of what is rattling around in my new manuscript, The Art of Heaven, which I am hopefully finishing at the moment.

LR: Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. I’m sure the readers of Pedestal Magazine will enjoy hearing what you have to say as much as I have.

RJ: You’re very welcome.