AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK LAWLER
For readers unfamiliar with the work of Patrick Lawler, unfamiliarity is a good place to start. In fact, it seems preposterous to define the kinds of work Patrick is up to—poetry, screenwriting, fiction, filmmaking, to call out a few genres—and thus much more acceptable to just wander into his world(s), to take part in what he makes, and yet we have to create a kind of entrance for ourselves when our interest is peaked by unfamiliarity. Sometimes that entrance takes time, and we do not move into the currents of an artist until the cosmos creak, and suddenly we are ushered in the back door, blundering without a map. Other times we hear an entrance in sounds between words, or see an entrance as an image splits, and suddenly we are in.
I first heard the name Patrick Lawler around ten years ago, when a poet friend of mine who grew up somewhere on the East Coast told our then recently formed Chicago book club about an amazing book he’d read, which turned out to be Lawler’s second book of poems, Reading a Burning Book. Somehow, our book club never mentioned that book again and didn’t read it and, well, never even met as a club, so when I joined SUNY-ESF as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the fall of 2018, Lawler’s name, and presence, became more tangible. Suddenly anyone who enjoyed reading—and anyone seeing how much innovation ties into imagination on the ESF campus—was telling me, the new guy, “you have to meet Patrick Lawler. You just have to,” they said.
I first met Patrick Lawler when he arrived on ESF’s one campus one morning with a hazmat suit and a puncturing grin. He was here to present a film he wrote, Singing to the Earth Until a Tree Grows—which is based on his poem of the same name (which he also calls a poemformance)—to a room full of high school students who are taking a college-level writing class. My role in the day was to MC the event, and thus to help students see how Singing to the Earth Until a Tree Grows took the journey from the mind to the page to a poemformance to the screen and back to a performance. Students read poems by Lucille Clifton and Wendell Berry (two poets whose work Patrick mentions inspired some of “Singing to the Earth Until a Tree Grows”) in preparation, and their first exposure was to Patrick entering the room in a hazmat suit, reading from the beginning of his poem. What struck me in that moment was not the contagious beauty of Patrick’s immersion, both in himself and his surroundings—as well as in the sincerity of peculiarity—but how much he was there for the questions and the students, and not just for his work. There for the room, the air, the inquiry which is breathing.
But also the comedy. Just before Patrick performed that day, he was locked behind a door that doubled as the kitchen to the student dining hall and just the image itself—of a grown man getting into a hazmat suit in the back of a kitchen—multiplied the apocalyptic palpitations of the entire building and the place was thrown into focus. Fast forward a couple of months and here I am, sitting down with Patrick at a coffee shop where, right when we meet and I ask him if he’d like something to eat or drink, he tells me he’s between a sinus infection and a colonoscopy, and that he can only drink black coffee.
Throughout the course of our conversation, questions and answers glide back and forth between one constant laugh. Patrick’s heart is funny and his brain is hearty. But he also is an admirable listener, as I can see him take every question down deep before he lets himself answer, and this, at the end of the day, is why he is such a great teacher and writer. Patrick pauses numerous times in the interview to read from the work we discuss, and those moments have been included in audio blips throughout, and though the full audio exists, the espresso machine impinges enough to allow the clarity of Patrick’s ideas and words to get through, and so here below they—and the writer himself—are, in image and voice and film and text. Lastly, and as part of the interview series for Unearthed, we are featuring work from those being interviewed alongside the conversation. Thus be sure to see Patrick’s poem, “Singing to the Earth Until a Tree Grows,” published in this issue here, and for the first time in text form. The film version can be viewed here.
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Tyler Flynn Dorholt: We’re at a coffee shop, so we’ll be dealing with all kinds of sounds in here.
Patrick Lawler: That’s what I really want. I used to read poetry in various venues—slam poetry and all kinds of performative things—and there was nothing better than to read in a bar, where you have a heckler in the audience. Those are sounds you end up engaging with in your poems.
Dorholt: I would like to start in the present, in the sense that we can move through the past of your work throughout the interview. I am wondering what you can say about the most recent thing you’ve written or created, and maybe a little perhaps about how it arose, or where it lives right now?
Lawler: I think it’s John Ashbery who has said that, “you always begin at the beginning, which is now,” so yes, what I’m writing right now is a poem/performance/movie script and it’s called “Back in America Paradise is Burning.” It’s a poem-performance-script about a cruise ship off an island called Broken, and the cruise ship has these Felliniesque characters. The island has been victimized by a hurricane, with tipped-over ships and damaged trees and cracked buildings. And back in America Paradise is burning. It just captivates me, this idea of our wealth and extravagance and excess contrasted with people who are suffering because of the decisions and the lifestyles we’ve led. So you have this cruise ship with all this extravagance, which is an extension of America—the source and the cause of the environmental damage and poverty of the island. It’s this interesting mix; it’s kaleidoscopic—culturally, thematically. I have directors showing up on the ship, and I have an array of characters. It occurs over Halloween so people are dressed as Marilyn Monroe. The protagonist goes dressed as America.
Dorholt: I think maybe you could be a cruise ship poet-in-residence and that reality right there wouldn’t be that far from what you’re dealing with.
Lawler: Exactly.
Dorholt: And there’s something about the irony of Paradise, CA, right?
Lawler: That was the inspiration. That and Puerto Rico and our disregard … and Haiti and St. Martin’s and all those islands that have been so damaged. I talked to somebody from Puerto Rico who was saying that at one time hurricanes were regenerative. They viewed them as coming through very much like forest fires. But what has happened, with global warming, is that they’ve become intensely destructive. So that’s all part of it, but in the meantime I’m creating.
Dorholt: It’s great that it speaks directly to the environment and the reason I say that is that I’m new to the College of Environmental Science and Forestry. What I’ve learned in a very short time—especially as someone coming from the Humanities—is that, at any given time—whether you’re skirting the quad or waiting for a sandwich at Trailhead—you overhear these vibrant particles of, not another language but a language that is very fresh, at least to me. This made me think a lot about your work in terms of space—I get a strong feeling of an immersion in and mining of space and place. It surfaces in both your intricate grappling of imagery and also this moment in your book Underground (Notes Toward an Autobiography) where you talk about a process in which you can “dream and desire and create intimate archi(text)ures.” I am wondering, first, how much the idea of place factors into your thinking, or making; and then too how you reconcile the differences between what we might consider internal place and external place?
Lawler: I think place and making are two of the things I’ve tried to bridge. I’ve learned this at ESF; the students helped me bridge the materiality of the world and the spirit of its inhabitants. It’s that interior/exterior sort of thing. I’ll give you an example of another book I’m at the end of completing, and another that I’m currently working with, and that is called Love Letters to Loon Lake. This is a lake I’d gone to for forty years, maybe fifty years, and then I discovered that Thomas Edison, William Burroughs, Henry Ford, and Firestone had camped on the shores of Loon Lake. My mind went crazy. I thought, this is the most amazing thing ever. But I was certain it was imaginary, a fable from the local people who thought it was a great story. But in reality it happened. They camped on the shores that I was very familiar with. So I wrote the book where I combine poetry, nature reflections, environmental issues, and history with these characters—Ford and Edison, in particular. Both of whom were quite weird, as was Firestone—and I reflect on this sense of place that I had seen in one way and that these individuals had viewed in another. They were the reshapers of our world, in terms of our sense of space and our sense of time—and in doing that they had created a world that is influenced by global warming and a whole range of negative things. So it all kind of interconnects in this reflective piece where I deal with ideas I really care about, and it all comes out of a sense of place.
Dorholt: This could be something you could write forever. I’m having a hard time imagining that these characters aren’t all together right now by a campfire. So have you had to temper your possible desires to get really factual with some of the things?
Lawler: Oh yeah. There’s lots of factual stuff. It’s intermixed. There’s reality and fantasy merging together. And I brought this (Patrick takes out his laptop) because, just, well, I could quote some things. I’ll tell you where it begins.
Dorholt: I think what you’re bringing up is kind of a way to revisit the idea that when we go to similar places that people have gone to and you just say, “that’s a wonderful place,” but then the question never becomes, “well, what in particular did you do there and how did that make it wonderful?”
Lawler: Exactly. The other part of the question about the inside and outside is that, in every one of my books I also view the physicality of the book, that it has to be reshaped in some ways. So for instance I have a book called Book Content to Stay Inside the Tree, which is a book designed to never be a book.
Dorholt: So there would be one copy?
Lawler: There would be one copy and it would be pulped. All of the book would be pulped up and turned into a different kind of book and that would be my book. I’m still working on that one.
Dorholt: Well, you know we could get a grant proposal to put that tree on the Quad. See how that goes. Can you read from what you’re looking at?
Excerpt from Loon Lake
Lawler: “The ground beneath my feet sparks” is the first thing I wrote before I heard the story of these four people.
Dorholt: That sounds to me, in hearing it, like someone trying to take time back out of a time lapse. You’re having to deal with quite a bit of fluttering through the course of decades.
Lawler: Yes, I was writing that for decades. But let me back up a little bit. When my friend and I decided to investigate the history of Loon Lake— that’s essentially what we were doing: gathering stories from his mother and people who had resided around Loon Lake for most of their lives—we were monitoring the depths of Loon Lake. My friend had a fish-finder and he would call out numbers and I would write them on the map. So we would have all the different depths of Loon Lake, but when it started raining we said, let’s look at all the metaphorical depths of Loon Lake. So what happens with this book is that it becomes a book that, instead of being arranged vertically, it is arranged horizontally, so that the poems are on top and the prose is on the bottom. The line between the pages in the crease becomes the surface of the lake, and in order to get below it you have to get inside it. And there are maps as well.
Dorholt: So you have to pry each page, rather than turn?
Lawler: Yes, that’s right. Eventually my friend decides to sell his camp, that his grandfather had built. It was really a moving time, as we were fishing for the last time on the lake and four loons come around us with this haunting sort of sound …
Dorholt: Edison and Burroughs and …
Lawler: Exactly! It was like, are you kidding me! It was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had. They were saying goodbye.
Dorholt: The comical correlation between that and a loony bin—I’m sure that’s in there too right?
Lawler: Oh yes. And trying to understand the loon, and the loon language. There’s a lot of things I address in the course of it.
Dorholt: That kind of garbled caterwauling of the loon is unmatched.
Lawler: Oh my gosh, yes. I think another thing about ESF … it made me see the world as inspiration. It wasn’t just what was inside me, and what I was thinking and feeling and imagining. It is that the world itself has its own energy and you need to listen to hear it. I could certainly hear it in the language of the four loons.
An artist I was thinking about earlier, in relation to Book Content to Stay Inside the Tree, is Katie Paterson. I believe she’s Norwegian. She’s planted a forest in Norway, and in a hundred years it will become an anthology of books.
“A forest has been planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unread and unpublished, until the year 2114.”
Isn’t that something? So yes, we should plant that tree.
Dorholt: You know this is a good lead-in. I find that, in your poems and stories and fiction, there isn’t a line I want to draw, or a desire to say that you are any one kind of writer more than you are another. Thus I want to talk about your fiction for a moment.
I read most of your novel, Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, in the back of a van on a long ride up to ESF’s Ranger School in Wanakena. There are many thematically rhythmic undertones. In particular, the use of repetition as disruption; the use of change as constancy, as something that right when it happens it happens again (and how do we get ahold of it); the uncertainty we have as humans; and the interlinkage of tragedy and comedy …so I’d like to ask you about the differences between memory and imagination. The speaker seems stashed in a place where these differences are of the utmost interest and concern—can you speak about the interplay, or outer play, of memory and imagination?
Lawler: Essentially, if you asked me what the theme of that whole book is, I couldn’t come up with two better terms than the connections between memory and imagination, because a lot of that is my past, but filtered through alterations of that past. So little things, like the miniature golf course—my father was a dreamer, so he was always having different sorts of “oh we’ve got to do this and we’ve got to do that,” but he was also an alcoholic so those dreams never happened, and he always had a little distortion so that he’d have this dream but there’d always be distortions around those dreams—they’d never be fully realized. And so, in my own life, I had to complete those imaginings, and so life kept changing, but it was always the same, so the characters in the book … every chapter they’re the same characters but they always have different roles. Everything shifts but it kind of remains the same. It was a joy to write and I wrote it so quickly, it was amazing. I’d been trying to do that book for maybe ten or twenty years. I was returning from OCC (Onondaga Community College) where I was teaching an evening creative writing class, and I had given them this assignment to write an autobiography of lies, and so on the way home, in my head, on about a twenty minute ride, I wrote the entire first chapter of that book. I read it to the class after I had them read their assignments, and I thought to myself that, through the combination of fiction and lies, we can arrive at the big T Truth.
Dorholt: You know, there’s so much patience and strength to that refrain, “that was the year … that was the year.” It goes hand-in-hand with something you just said, in the sense that, how can one successfully be a dreamer and an alcoholic at the same time, like you get this idea and you want to do it—“that was the year we wanted to do this”—but this is also the fact that a year is a moment, an hour in a day, right, so a year can be filled with a 150 “that was a year’s” and I think that creates such a steady wheel throughout this novel. You just mentioned the start, would you read the first paragraph, the beginning?
Lawler: Yes. And the titles, of the chapters, those were the poems. I wrote down a whole list—some of which related to a chapter and some of which really didn’t—but I wanted it in there anyway.
Dorholt: So you had a list ahead of time, and it was a good way to compartmentalize the imagination?
Lawler: Yes, but this one was one of my favorites.
Patrick reads from Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds
Dorholt: So that’s the first car ride home moment? And so, was it just a blast after that, in terms of … did you come home that day and cancel everything for the next few days?
Lawler: I wrote that first chapter almost right away, and after that I got sidetracked. I was working with a novel called Dance in the Dirthouse, which became something of my James Joyce novel, which was unpublishable, and I worked on that for quite a while. It was my commitment to a lengthier, more expansive piece. As a poet, I’ve always admired novelists. I’ve admired the fact that they build worlds and sustain them for a whole 250 or 500 pages. For me, working in poetry, I never felt I did the same thing as novelists though I always aspired to that. So I had this world that I created which was really, essentially, a rural community in Central New York—Jordan, that’s where I grew up. Actually I’m hoping to do something with Dance in the Dirthouse now—I’m working with a pilot script. Also keeping the remains of the original in mind, I’ve written a book-length poem with discarded lines from that novel. So it’s never gone away, but Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is what I wrote after saying, why try to write a book, why try to write a novel, just write. So I went back to that thing and I started just working on the pieces, and I think my next thing was the miniature golf course, and then I said, okay, I’ve got the voice, I know what I want here. So it was really a novel based on two things: place and voice. The place really is the cellar where I grew up, in Jordan, a small rural community, and the voice was this character trying to understand this insane world.
Dorholt: Everywhere I look—and even in a lot of your work—bees are around. I love that moment in your novel where everything is returning to itself—honey returning to bees—so is there something about the bee? I mean, I see little notes now, even on bottom of Justin’s almond butter cups, that bees are responsible for 1/3 of what you eat …
Lawler: With the approaching demise of the bees—bee colony collapse disorder—we have to come to terms with what we are destroying, with what some have called the insect apocalypse. I love bees—and one of the reasons is that I was a house painter, for years, and I killed a lot of bees. I’d be going around the house scraping and priming and painting, and they’d be under all the shutters and I couldn’t paint around there. Then there came a moment—my fierce-green-fire-dying-in-the-eye moment when from the top of my ladder I saw a white bee fly by me. That was it. I felt, my God, what am I doing? Since then I have written a collection of poems called Lessons on How to Become a Bee.. You see I am a firm believer that we need to replace what we destroy.
Dorholt: Yes. I’d like to move into poetry here. There is this really striking line in one of your earlier poems, “The Meaning of the Russian Novel,” from the Russian section …
Lawler: I just want you to know there was no collusion.
Dorholt: Only between memory and Imagination.
Lawler: There you go.
Dorholt: You write in this poem that “A farmer’s duty is to take the world back into the ground.” It’s a remarkable line, and I’ve been thinking so much about the meaning of the word “unearthed,” and then I re-read this line in your poem and it made me think about how discovery is not always about yanking things out or up. And as you write, “Pushkin is unwriting his worlds;” and then I thought of another poem of yours, “Martha Graham Dances as Stravinsky’s Music Plays Inside a Burning House,” which begins with the line, “I grew up in a house that had once burnt down before I was born.” This poem has a stunning delicacy in the way it speaks to the past not stopping, about the ways in which you say, “Light could happen anywhere.” So I’m interested in hearing about the writer’s attempt to uncover, dig up, shed light on, return, listen. Can you speak to some of these poetic investigations that are related to unearthing, or even the farmer putting things back?
Lawler: Well, first of all, having grown up in a cellar, I think the idea of the earth was very different for me. I mean it’s a lived experience. For seven years I grew up inside the earth. Birds were fascinating to me; they were strangers. Unlike me, who walked inside the earth, they lived in the sky.
My relatives were all farmers, so I was very much involved with the land. Both my grandmothers’ farms bordered our property. This was a time when farmers were really farmers—they were connected to the earth. It wasn’t all chemicals and big machinery; they actually did things that were real like milking cows. For a child it was a great experience. I loved doing the hay and all of that, but as far as the actual earth itself, I think we do both—deposit in the earth and retrieve from the earth. We have to return something to the earth in order for it to move out of the earth. There is the planting and harvesting and you begin to participate in the cyclical sense of things. I think that in most of my work I do both. I’m always going back to that cellar, to the root of things, while also seeing where that grows. How it grows. What it grows into. So there is no predetermined sense that this is going to be such-and-such, once it comes out of its earth. You go back to the roots and then what comes out of that experience is shocking, it’s beautiful. And it rarely disappoints me if I approach things like that. It comes out of the earth as something fantastic. And I guess I relate this to my poetry, my fiction, my films, but that’s where it starts, it goes back to that cellar. And sometimes I have to return there mentally—I think I say this in one of my interviews: you see the world differently when you grow up in a cellar. I mean you’re a kid and there are little rectangles of glass and they are meant to be windows but you can’t see out of them.
Dorholt: Well, Unearthed is the name of this journal, of course, but under-earth is a totally different vantage, and yet a lot of your work also has a wonderful understanding of the sky. The return of parachutes and people sky diving … it’s this constantly colorful collage of things coming down, so perhaps your awareness is much greater of the in-the-air?
Lawler: Exactly. The birds and the parachutes. I never really thought of that but of course, Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is a perfect example.
Dorholt: Right, and a different question might be, what are the cellars in the sky, in a way. I love that the novel has an epigraph from Ursula K. LeGuin about a flute, and then at the end of the novel there is a boy playing a flute. It makes me think of a quote from William Gass: “the poet at first flutes on his instrument, until, finally, he finds a way to play backwards through it, or upside down, or without using any breath, or simply by thinking through the tube, sounding the sense somewhere.” I’ve been reading a lot of Gass lately, so the second I hit the flute at the end of your book and came back to the beginning, I thought about how the poet is always playing some kind of instrument, but it’s not until they’re able to understand how to play it in reverse in a way where the poem can come out. I guess you can take that as kind of a question, in terms of how sound and music plays into your writing?
Lawler: So, as far as this book goes, I asked the publishers if, instead of having an author’s picture they could have Kokopelli in that spot. That was a part of this book from the start. It was part of the inspiration. That particular trickster. That magical, musical, trickster. So I was working toward it but always knew that it existed there, as part of this. In some ways it was the unearthing that occurred in that book, to reveal that at the end.
Dorholt: I like to think of perhaps the metaphor of the book existing inside of an instrument until the sound could come out. And the understanding that that’s where it was.
Lawler: Exactly. I think there’s a very oral sort of quality about this book, in that some of the pieces have to be read out loud.
Dorholt: I did read a few of them that way—I probably would have disrupted the van if I’d done so earlier—but early in the novel the speaker says that “in school I learned there would be transition stories. Stories between the old stories and new stories.” A couple of your poems mention the transition element of stories too. Do you think of that often? That poems are transitions?
Lawler: For a long time, and this I think comes out of my experience at ESF, I’ve believed that the old stories aren’t adequate any longer. We have to tell new stories. Or at least find new ways of telling those stories. And so I think we no longer can rely on the first-person singular point of view. We have to look at more of the first-person plural point of view. We can no longer rely on climax or on a linear sense of telling a story. It has to be prismatic. I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve thought about this with Loon Lake and my other work. If we rely on the old stories, we only repeat the old problems. Ursula K. LeGuin was very much aware of the Eurocentric stories we tell, and she was always trying to transcend those stories—or maybe more accurately to unearth a new story. She created stories and worlds without conflict for example. It’s like, why do we have to have stories where conflict is the center of our attention? So I think if you said what’s the conflict in Rescuers of Skydivers I don’t know, and it certainly doesn’t tell a story in any sort of linear fashion. I know there’s an element of the postmodern or whatever in that. But I think it goes beyond just experimentation—trying to still say something but do it in a different, more challenging manner.
Dorholt: You know, if I was pressed to—sitting in front of the writer who wrote it—say, what’s the conflict here, I might say, “how do we get in line with time without trying to define it.” There’s something to be said about why conflicts shouldn’t be the centerpiece, but storytelling culture I think has come away from that a little bit, in the sense that we ask questions like, what is at stake, which is a different form of what is conflict, right? That’s an important thing to have. The stake is why you’re writing.
Lawler: Exactly. And you could point to that in Rescuers of Skydivers. The stakes get higher and higher.
Dorholt: Right, which should not be mistaken for conflict.
I’m going to jump gears here. You wrote a poem called “Donald Trump Holds the Mirror for Narcissus” a while back, at least long before there was any sign he would enter more deeply into what we call politics. And while I don’t necessarily want to talk about politics—although there are fabrics of that in some of your work—this poem has the line, “I can’t wait to buy another me.” So I have a two-part question here.
- What would Patrick Lawler do with another Patrick Lawler? That’s my first question.
Lawler: You know I have a series of poems from a book that’s never been published. It’s called The Exhalation Therapist and there’s a section in there—and I can’t send this book to contests because there’s too many references to Patrick Lawler—called “Patrick Lawler Remembers Patrick Lawler.” It looks at identity, what it is to be a poet, what it is to project your identity on your work and on other people. So I do know what I’d do with other me’s. And the poem kind of started when, early in Google experiences, I googled Patrick Lawler and I discovered that there was a Patrick Lawler who had a nail in his head.
Dorholt: Wow. Which is a return to a form of trepanation, from Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds.
Lawler: Yes, exactly. So this Patrick Lawler was a construction worker in, I think Denver, Colorado. He went to the dentist because he was experiencing some severe pain in his jaw area and the dentist took an ex-ray and said, you have a four-inch nail in your head. It went up through the jaw. As a construction worker he had a nail gun and kind of scratched himself and (wild sound describing a nail going into a face) did not know that there was a nail in his head! So, for a while, instead of resisting, instead of saying no, I want to be Patrick Lawler the poet, I became Patrick Lawler with a nail in his head.
Dorholt: I mean, the science of that being possible is quite delightful. I feel like some things exist in our bodies that we don’t know about, and that poems are that.
Lawler: Yes. So I’m going to pull this poem nail out of me.
Dorholt: I think what’s wonderful here is that, and you’ve talked about this in your work, you’re not afraid of mortality but you’re afraid of immortality; but you’re also afraid of the mortality of words. So there’s something in that, in the extra Patrick Lawler.
Dorholt: This (Trump) poem I speak of is in your wonderfully migratory waltz of a book, Feeding the Fear of the Earth, in which each poem’s title conjures or collaborates with a historical figure. How did the process of working closely with these famous figures alter your own practice; and has such interaction with these kinds of figured remained within the frame of your everyday writing and being?
Lawler: This is part of a series, the third book of four books. Three of which have come out. It’s part of Quintessence, and this one would be the earth book. It meant a lot to me, and again because of the ESF connection. If you look at the dedication page, these are all students, mostly at ESF. It means so much to me to have an opportunity to write about a subject that was inspired by my students. So how the book started was that what I wanted to do was write a book that transcended typical kinds of topics and showed interconnections between different fields and different individuals, so there would be no sense that these people couldn’t talk because they were from different centuries. I wanted to transcend time and I wanted to transcend place, while still interconnecting some of the themes that were very important to time and place. So the book is organized around environmental disasters, so that each section starts with environmental figures visiting disasters. And there’s no place better for somebody to visit a disaster than Donald Trump, right? So that was how the book got structured and evolved to the point where it considered, how do we go beyond these catastrophic moments? How do we provide some reprieve, some resurgence? I have these different characters coming together—some of which have been very important in my life, some of which have not. But I saw the interconnections creating a spark. Some of them I just think are beautiful titles.
Dorholt: I think that you’ve said before, in conversation, that titles often come to you first, and they allow you and end?
Lawler: Yes.
Dorholt: So what happens when they don’t come to you first, or do you think they’re always kind of there?
Lawler: I think they’re always there. For example, in Rescuers of Skydivers I would write the piece and I would have these different titles I’d already written and I would connect the title to the section. With Feeding the Fear of the Earth, some of these poems were written without these titles, and then I put these titles, when I knew they were a book, together. So the “Donald Trump Holds the Mirror for Narcissus” poem had Donald Trump in it in the beginning, but he was not holding up a mirror for Narcissus. A lot of the titles started to shift when I saw the book evolving in a different direction. I know the Mickey Mantle poem definitely had a different title. But I am so proud of having a poem that characterized Donald Trump before …
Dorholt: Can you read it?
Patrick Lawler reads “Donald Trump Holds the Mirror for Narcissus”
Lawler: This is when, for me, Donald Trump was one of the most reprehensible people in America. And this was very early. Because of his consumerism and what he represented. This was what some people meant by a “successful” human being and I thought to myself no, no he’s not. This poem was written in probably 1991 or so.
Dorholt: It’s perfect for today. The “buy another me” line threw me all over the place.
You’ve mentioned students and their importance in your work. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you do a poemformance of Singing to the Earth Until a Tree Grows, which is published in this issue. What I enjoyed in seeing you perform your poem was the way in which you engaged with the students in the room. I know that you studied at both Le Moyne College and then at Syracuse University. As a professor and teacher, and looking back at your own studies, what has been the role of influence in your career, in how you yourself embrace it, reject it, initiate it, navigate it, both in your teaching in your writing—and I’ll add that I’m approaching influence from Jonathan Lethem’s interpretation of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence as the ecstasy of influence. How does that word play into your life?
Lawler: First of all, I never started out my life thinking I’d ever be a teacher. I hadn’t had great experiences in the class room, so I was mostly doodling and writing lines for imaginary poems. But then I had a creative writing class with Barbara Moore Clarkson at Le Moyne and it changed my life. It was like, wow, this is really good, I really have to take this seriously. No more doodling. And then there was a professor I had and he was going away for a conference and asked me if I would take his classes for that week. I was an older senior—I was returning to college; I had dropped out several times—so I said, why would I want to take your class? And he goes, no, I want you to teach the class. So I said, really? Ok. I was like, wow, people are actually listening to me and it was about stuff I really cared about. Poetry. I thought, this is really quite an experience. And then I taught at OCC—and I love OCC; the students come from such diverse backgrounds—and I really connected with them, and I fell in love with teaching. I worked in the writing center there, working one-on-one with students, and I saw students struggling and then overcoming those struggles—and I thought, this is what teaching is all about. I fell in love with it. If asked, do I view myself as a writer or a teacher, I would definitely say teacher first. Not that both don’t inform each other.
Dorholt: So in your experiences before that, studying creative writing, what was that like for you, since you had come in and out of school and suddenly you knew you had to get serious about it? Were you swallowing all the books you could or trying to write more …?
Lawler: I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to write. I was painting houses, working in a glass factory, that kind of stuff, and then Barbara Moore Clarkson calls me on the phone and says, you’ve been accepted at Syracuse University, in their creative writing program, and I go, really? She goes yeah, I applied for you. You’re kidding me, I said, that’s amazing, the problem is that I don’t have my undergraduate degree yet, and she said well you get your ass over there and finish your degree. So I did. And then I went to the program at Syracuse. It was a different experience. I was writing a real lot and I was immersing myself in reading, but I did find, rather early, that there was a workshop poem that you could do and I thought, I can do this but I don’t know if I want to do this. Right away I thought, to write the poem that can be read in four minutes, or whatever, and be critiqued … I backed off of that for a while. I didn’t go right through to get my creative writing degree. I wanted to write. Some of the experiences were really good but I didn’t think of writing as a career. I saw it as a love.
Dorholt: The workshop is a fascinating space for trying to lean toward or pull back from the inherent structures of it. Having been in workshops and having received an MFA, and now that I’m teaching some workshops, I think about that all of the time. There is a workshop poem, but I think that the times that were most valuable to me were when I brought something to a workshop that I thought wasn’t that, and then the conversation became less about what to send to a journal and more about what is this a fragment of—something we should talk about as a class, in what it relates to. And then maybe one of your peers will read it closely enough to say something like, you should read this other person and then you can make that decision on your own.
Lawler: A Drowning Man is Never Tall Enough could not have been written without workshop experience, but the next one—Reading a Burning Book—was a book, and essentially a poem, that I wrote while trying to get rid of all of my workshop experiences. I got some valuable things out of workshop. I got a sense of voice. A sense of looking at detail and really getting into the specifics of a poem. That kind of thing. But I wanted to move into a different direction and I wasn’t sure at the time what was working.
Dorholt: So when you’re teaching, in anything close to a workshop setting, and you notice a student who might be in the same place you were back then, how do you approach that?
Lawler: So now I teach more playwriting and scriptwriting. So there you have the dialogue and this kind of other space that’s a bigger space to work with. Poetry has its own space, and when I see a young poet working along the borders, I want to make sure I don’t snuff that out.
Dorholt: Scriptwriting has more tangible, necessary tools. I wouldn’t advocate assuming such tools with poetry.
Lawler: Yes. One of the problems with dealing with scriptwriting classes is that students are so exposed to pop culture—and these terrible super hero worlds—that to get them to think outside of that prescribed way of viewing plot and character can become a real challenge. I have a list of maybe fifty movies and I’ll tell them, every week to sample from this list, and I’ll have them critique, talk, and write about them.
Dorholt: Writing poems about or toward films is a wonderful thing too.
Lawler: I think that crossing genres is such a great thing. When you combine film and poetry, or film and anything, poetry and anything, it’s such a great alembic.
Dorholt: It’s freeing. But it’s often hard to articulate that to someone who might feel like you’re making an attempt at purposeful hybridity.
Lawler: Hybridity has become a bad word, which is ridiculous.
Dorholt: It has, and it’s a wonderful word. Maybe it’s when hybrid vehicles came around where hybridity became utilitarian.
Lawler: People become suspicious, like you’re trying to be avant-garde, but it seems weird to me that people don’t embrace that.
Dorholt: Well I’ll try and come full circle here. I’d like to end on what will hopefully be a consistent thread for the journal Unearthed, and that is a short discussion on what the word, or the art of, storytelling, means to you. For instance, “Singing to the Earth Until a Tree Grows” went from being a poem to a poemformance to a film script to a poem. Can you speak about storytelling, and how the choice of different mediums has reflected your ideas and visions?
Lawler: I used to describe my poetry—and this goes back to A Drowning Man is Never Tall Enough—as writing a story, writing it on glass, and then allowing the glass to shatter. And then picking up those pieces. Especially the Russian novel poem but even some of the conventional poems. I’ve always seen the story as being fundamental to poetry, but in a fragmented sort of way. Non-linear, but still a story. I think, as I was working with fiction, that began to influence my poetry even more, and my poetry began to influence my fiction. My sense of story has more to do with voice. So there is a story but it is really influenced by the person telling the story. That gives it a whole different angle and twist. I have characters in my head. Another thing I should mention is that, when people say in creative writing classes to discover your voice, it’s really to discover your voices. Plural. So you have to tap into those at different times and I think in my short stories is where I learned to do that, more than in my poetry, but it’s dramatically influenced my poetry.
For example, I had a story I wanted to tell. I was watching on TV a news story about a mine disaster and I thought, God, what a terrible way to die. I was emotionally connected to the tragedy and wanted to write about it. Then I thought, wow, what a boring poem that would be, so I wrote from the point of view of someone who counts disaster victims. And that became “Aftermath.”
Dorholt: Can you share some of that?
Lawler reads from “Aftermath …”
Lawler: Understanding voice helped me to tell stories. The Russian Novel poems are very much like that. I created a persona. It’s not even a persona; it’s more like tapping into another part of me.
Dorholt: I think you hit on something really valuable in the sense that I think poems fail when they set out to tell an exact story. And poets often forget that the thing that made them want to tell the story is the poem, and that thing can’t surface until you write to it and then through it. So I like the connection you make about knowing the boredom.
So what might you be able to say about the first thing you ever remember making and thinking, huh, I’ve made something? Or when you said, huh, that’s a story?
Lawler: I started with writing stories when I was a teenager and those were influenced by Edgar Allen Poe, and which started to get influenced by J.D. Salinger. That’s a terrible combination, by the way, Poe and Salinger.
Dorholt: The Catcher and the Raven!
Lawler: Rise High on the Roofbeam, Raven!
Dorholt: Love and Squaw!
Lawler: As a freshman in college, there was an assignment to write a poem, in a literature composition class, and I wrote this poem which was pretty surrealistic, and I still remember it was called “Pajama Man.” I was called, after that, the poet of the class by the professor, who was a James Joyce scholar, so I thought, wow, this is something, and then I became influenced by Dylan Thomas, another bad influence.
Dorholt: Well, only if he was a friend.
Lawler: Since then I think it has been mostly about capturing the stories of my youth. Which is what we do. I think Toni Morrison says something along the lines of, if you speak in the language of your youth and your neighborhood, you’ll say something beautiful, something honest. And I think that’s true. I’ve gone back in to the cellar. To the beginning. Which brings us full circle.
Lawler reads from (reading a burning book)
