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Miles Waggener in Conversation with James Shea, August 2011

 

Miles Waggener is a poet and professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. A native Arizonian, he is the author of Phoenix Suites, and most recently, Sky Harbor, with Pinyon Publishing.

James Shea is the author of Star in the Eye, selected for the 2008 Fence Modern Poets Series and named as a "Favorite Book of 2008" by the Chicago Sun-Times. His poems have appeared in various journals, including American Letters and Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, and Verse. His translations of Japanese poetry can be found in The Iowa Review, Circumference, and Gin’yu. A former research fellow at Utsunomiya University in Japan, he received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, and as a poet-in-residence in the Chicago public schools.

 

JAMES SHEA: As a native Arizonian, you wrote poems in your first book Phoenix Suites that were deeply informed by the arid landscapes and rich language of the Southwestern desert. Has your relationship to the natural world changed at all, and how has it influenced the poems in your new book Sky Harbor?

MILES WAGGENER: The Sonoran desert has, for whatever reason, been a source and obsession. I consider the desert home, no matter where I am. In turn, the poems continue to feature the words of this place: birds, the plants, the rocky ground, especially the kinds of plants and animals that show up when the desert is plowed up and disturbed. No, my relationship hasn’t changed, even though I’ve tried to stop establishing the poems as taking place in a geographic location. I’m in love or addicted to the words of this place, its smells, its memories, etc.

 

JS:  What prompted your recent interest in writing poems without a fixed geographic location? Are you aiming for a more dream-like effect?

MW: Well, I probably should say that every poem comes from a place, but sometimes they don’t include proper nouns or landmarks. Earlier, I mentioned trying to stop geographically locating poems, simply because I’m looking for new challenges, subjects, or environments. I’d welcome a poem that might trigger something dream-like. I’ll try that.  

 

JS:  I was struck by the syntax—the long, winding sentences—in Phoenix Suites, and I find them again in Sky Harbor. In fact, some poems consist entirely of a single sentence. How do you think about syntax, and are you interested in the way long sentences can freight a sense of inevitability within the poem?

MW: Spanish did this to me. Maybe Larry Levis did too. The hope that a cresting phrase, and the tensions created by the right margin, or line break, might enact a kind of crisis or condition, interests me. I love to read the sentences of poets like Gabriel Celaya, Levis, Notley, among others. You’re dead on with the feeling of inevitability, if I understand you correctly. By inevitability, do you mean how a sentence can play out and make us feel that something irrevocable has happened?

 

JS:  Yes, I’m thinking of your single-sentence poems in Sky Harbor, like “Bird in a Box” or “Ampersand in Mind,” in which the speaker’s utterance unspools with the force of someone speaking without interruption. It feels as if the poem couldn’t have been said another way. Is form central to how you begin to write a poem, or is it a concern that comes later, perhaps during revision?

MW: It depends on the poem, I guess. The sentence and its turns can evoke a tone that drives the poem as it emerges, either during early drafts or when I come back to it. It’s hard to gauge or retrace.  

 

JS:  You’ve been an active translator of Spanish-language poetry over the years, and I know that you admire César Vallejo a great deal. In terms of your new book, could you talk a bit about the importance of doing translations and in particular reading Spanish-language poetry?

MW: On one level, translation is a way to know a poem intimately. Similarly, taking the time to memorize a poem is to know it even if the day’s drudgery and toil eat at you. My friend, the poet James Jay, taught creative writing workshops in the prisons, and he speaks often of the power that memorizing a poem has on his students, for it’s something one can keep, even when they take everything away from you. The process of translation is another way for a poem to dwell inside us, in its double life, as flawed or contradictory as the results may be. Similarly, the process of enjoying multiple existing translations and its original is wonderful. Sky Harbor has poems that stemmed from this energy. I was reading and teaching Vallejo’s Trilce at the time, and this beautiful and strange poem with its English translations gave me the courage to write portions of this book.