Line / Break | Season 4 with Kevin Prufer

 

Interview Transcript

Ryo Yamaguchi (00:05):
Hey everybody. I’m Ryo Yamaguchi, the publicist at Copper Canyon Press, and you are tuning into season four of our interview series Line Break, which goes off the page and into the poems and minds of our beloved poets. We’ve had so much fun over these seasons, hearing poems, talking about writing, books, life. It’s been one of the favorite things we do at the press.

(00:29):
So friends, for season four, a format change. For this season, we’re doing some close reads. Each episode will focus on either a single poem or a single topic, wandering away and returning and wandering away again, along all the little paths we simply can’t resist. The episodes will probably be a little tighter, a little shorter, but we can’t say for sure, thanks for joining us.

(00:56):
Death. There may be no greater, more pervasive topic in poetry. My taste might be a little goth, but I love good death poems, small words of verse facing the immensity of the ever after. There’s something about the boldness of it that stirs my blood, and there’s a lot that stirs in Kevin Prufer’s The Fears.

(01:21):
Whether considering his own death, the passing of his father, or the archaic brutalities of ancient Rome, Prufer in this series looks death in the face at all of its scales, close, vast, immediate, over millennia. It’s one of the most cohesive collections on death I’ve read in a very long time, and it tickles my livingness with, as best as I can put it, affirming precarity.

(01:48):
And yet, there’s more or perhaps less. I’m so happy to have Kevin here today to talk about these poems, but it isn’t death so much I want to talk about as the larger space it inhabits, a space that contains also finitude, nostalgia, loss, change, forgetting and obscurity. What I want to talk about is absence. Kevin, thanks so much for being here.

Kevin Prufer (02:19):
Sure. Thank you for having me.

Ryo Yamaguchi (02:22):
So, I love the collection. I should show it off here quickly in the screen as we want to do, a wonderful piece of art on the front of it. I also love the typography actually in particular, the way this is typeset and the format of the poems and stuff in the book.

(02:36):
I want to start this conversation though with a question for you. It’s a little bit of a life question. We’re mid-December here. We’re closing in on the Winter Solstice. This book to me is one that’s written pretty much exclusively at night. It inhabits the night in all of these beautiful ways.

(02:53):
So I’m thinking about the long night of Winter Solstice, and for you, if you have any rituals or even fond memories of winter solstice, that could be the holiday, a New Year’s thing, or even specifically a solstice.

Kevin Prufer (03:05):
I don’t know if I have fond memories of the solstice. I don’t think I knew what the solstice was until I was in high school. It didn’t occur to me. I grew up in Cleveland though, where there’s endless snow, and it’s like some huge, God takes a gray washcloth and dampens it and then rolls it over the entire city in about October, and it stays there until April.

(03:34):
So I mean, I know if the poems have some source in memory, and that memory involves a lot of night and a lot of snow. That’s certainly that long period in Cleveland every year that I slept through.

Ryo Yamaguchi (03:53):
Absolutely. Do most of these poems take place in Cleveland? I was reading the book and thinking, I mean, you talk about the sodium street lights and things and the snow falling. As a long time Chicagoan, and it’s like, it just hits me like this nostalgic-core, even as that being maybe not necessarily a landscape that’s totally pleasant. I say this as someone who lives in the desert now and is basking in the sun all the time.

Kevin Prufer (04:18):
Yeah, most of them do. I mean, I think it helps me when I’m writing a poem to try to completely imagine the place where the poem takes place, because so many of these poems are sort of long, jangly, braided stories. And I think when you’re going to write a story, it’s important to know where the story is and where the story is, has to do with the story.

(04:43):
Cleveland seemed like a good place to be writing a book of poems about death. There’s so many possible metaphors in the landscape there for it, and it’s also something I know really well. I really think of myself as a Clevelander, even though I’m living in sunny Texas, which is the opposite of death.

Ryo Yamaguchi (05:03):
I think it is something that I feel this contrast in the poems and thinking about you in Texas, and again, as I mentioned, just my own experience as a reader here in Santa Fe. I was curious what the genesis was in thinking back on Cleveland. I mean, a lot of the poems also take place in some form of childhood or early adulthood, interactions with the father.

(05:24):
I know the death of your father, and a reckoning with that is a major theme throughout the book. And I’m curious if that was one of the generative impulses or if these poems were more occasional part of a daily practice and you found them into a theme, or if you were… Tell me about how you put the book together, I suppose.

Kevin Prufer (05:46):
Well, I think I’m ultimately a fiction writer of a poet. I mean, none of the things that happened in the book are true. I made them all up. But there are little kernels of truth that sort of inspire the poems.

(06:05):
I did know a couple kids in college who spent the night in the college museum and fooled around with a mummy, but I didn’t do it. And I knew somebody whose father got arrested for drunk driving, but my father never did as far as I know. So all the little poems, I think they’re borne out of a particular memory, but it’s not usually my own memory. It’s usually somebody else’s then dramatically fictionalized.

(06:35):
But I think that fiction writer way of approaching a poem is one that really has, again, has a lot to do with setting and a lot to do with character. I mean, I always begin at home by thinking what has happened here, particularly to drive dramatic action and where’s it taking place and where it’s taking place have to do with what’s happening?

(06:58):
I was just having to write about this book for somebody else, and they were very tangled up in the idea of what’s true and what’s not true. And I kept on returning to the idea that the thing that’s true in the book is really the anxieties that drive the poems, The Fears, as the book is called, but facts themselves I think are less interesting.

Ryo Yamaguchi (07:23):
I had the sense, I mean, the museum poem, the whole scene of getting drunk with the museum and the mummy is so wonderful, and it’s something that just pushes the threshold of what seems plausible to me or something and whatnot. But I do feel the kernel of truth in this book is something…

(07:41):
Well, I’m interested to hear you talk about story and setting and different genre impulses that kind of inform these poems. And I’d like to talk also about essay and history. Of course, I mean, history plays a huge role in this, and that’s what the truth that I find in here is actually somewhat essayistic.

(07:57):
It’s the poet juxtaposing scenes, and also historical facts or scenes from history to arrive at some sort of form of truth. But maybe before we get into talking about some of the structure and form of the poems though, we have to hear one, I think, maybe if you’d be up for that and help contextualize us a little bit here.

Kevin Prufer (08:19):
Yeah. Is there anyone you want me to read?

Ryo Yamaguchi (08:24):
I mean, your choice for sure. I mean, I could certainly help.

Kevin Prufer (08:27):
I’ll read the one that takes place in the museum since we’re talking about it.

Ryo Yamaguchi (08:30):
That sounds great. That sounds great.

Kevin Prufer (08:31):
It’s called Finger.

(08:33):
Remember how we hid in the museum until the old woman turned off the lights and locked us in? Then we camped out on the floor among musty artifacts and drank ourselves into hilarity. You said we should take that old mummy out of his box so he could join us.

(08:52):
He was so light like paper mache. I propped him against the wall, and when I tried to wedge a cigarette into his hand, a single finger broke off, slipping through the linen into my palm.

(09:07):
In those days, I wanted to immortalize myself in the pages of a novel about a brilliant young man who left his home in Cleveland and did what? I was still discovering the plot. I smoked and typed then deleted what I typed. It would be a mystery, a body discovered strangled among unspooled film reels in the back of an art house theater.

(09:33):
And how you laughed when I leaped back, the mummy’s desiccated black finger skittering across the floor, how you held that finger like a half smoked cigar and waggled it at me. You were such a hilarious failure. Groucho Marx in the dark museum lifting that finger to your lips.

(09:52):
You didn’t care about anything. You, who would die jogging in a public park among pigeons and ice cream vendors, one evening later that June. Your sister was already dead head through a windshield. Your father too. “It was,” you said, “a family tradition,” holding that mummy’s finger and laughing. The mummy also thralled in death leaned against the wall, ghost lit by streetlights.

(10:26):
The strangled girl among the unspooled reels stared blankly at the ceiling fan that rustled the papers on the little desk in the corner, a single tear dried on her cheek. “What was a life,” I wrote, “but an infinitely replayable film?” Or some such nonsense? I wanted to be an important writer and to be therefore immortal.

(10:51):
You were taking apart a suit of armor. Then you were kissing the marble head of some dead emperor. The mummy stayed lost in his dream. Someone had cared for him once. Someone had rubbed his skin with ochre and resin then extracted his brain lovingly through the nostrils.

(11:13):
We slept on the floor having drunk far too much. Our candle’s gone out. When I woke there, you were at the window looking over the lamp-lit dead campus. We packed the mummy back into his case, and at dawn slipped out of the museum and disappeared into our futures.

(11:35):
My novel would remain unfinished forever. I’ve got that finger in a box on my writing desk. Its black skin has long since flaked away. It looks like ivory. My thumb has polished the bone.

Ryo Yamaguchi (11:57):
This is such a fun poem to me, and I think because of some of the structural, I mean, it’s sad too, of course, how you feel writing a straightforward story versus writing the poem. How can they do things differently or better, particularly in respect to a topic that’s really about loss, that’s about people being separated from each other?

Kevin Prufer (12:22):
Well, I mean, I write both fiction and poetry, but I always feel when I’m writing poetry that I am dealing with finer tools. The toolkit is so much finer, and when I’m writing fiction, I feel like I’m working with blunt tools, but there’s a delight in that.

(12:40):
But to me, my sense is that the finest tool that I have in poetry that I don’t have available to me in the same degree in fiction is silence. That is, there’s so many qualities and varieties of silence in a poem, from the silence that comes at the end of a line to the silence that can come midline in the form of a caesura. The silence between sections, the silence at the very end of the poem that sort of goes on for eternity after the poem ends.

(13:11):
And one of the things I’d love to do when I’m writing a poem is to create rhythms of silences. So, I’m very aware that a rhythm is not only created, I think, by the strong beats, for instance, in a line, but it’s also created by those silences that come end line, midline.

(13:30):
And at the same time, what I’m also thinking when I’m writing a poem is that I’m trying to create a very particular character, like this guy who’s having a conversation in his mind with his dead friend, the you of that poem who ends up dying in a park. And as that person is telling the story, what I get to do with poetry is I get to create the sort of hesitations that he has as he’s unwinding the story and make use of those hesitations that suggest the the mind at work on the unsolvable problem of the death of his friend that’s going on in the background of the poem.

(14:11):
So there’s a mind at work, and there’s this boy speaking, and with fiction, I don’t have access to those sort of silences. So I mean, people always want to say it with condensing, but it doesn’t feel like condensing to me at all. It has much more to do with, it has much more to do with the ability to create a mind at work on an unsolvable problem that poetry can do that I don’t find fiction can do with as much dexterity.

Ryo Yamaguchi (14:33):
But I love this idea of silence. And of course, this touches on our theme of absence today, and this was one of the key examples of it that I wanted to discuss in the form of these poems, in the silences.

(14:45):
And one version of this is that, in other poems in particular, well, the poem about drinking with the father and getting pulled over, that’s a poem that I feel has this kind of collage or montage quality to it. We’re jumping back and forth between scenes. We’re at the riverbank of the murder of the war death and things, and then back in the bar and all these things.

(15:07):
And there’s the way the mind is moving between these different scenes and constellating them. What’s so important about that is the gap in between them. There’s another poem where you, and I’m not going to be able to find it here in my notes, but there’s a poem where the character talks about a wish that he had as a younger person to live forever, and that the world would deform itself in order to enable that foreverness. Do you know what I’m talking about here, this poem?

Kevin Prufer (15:37):
Yeah.

Ryo Yamaguchi (15:39):
And it occurs to me throughout this and then elsewhere, that a lot of this work, there’s this idea that we have absence, we have these silences in order for the world to stay undeformed, to remain whole or something like that. And I don’t know, this is just a very pervasive sense I have in all of it. I don’t know. Could we read that poem? Do you know the poem I’m talking about? I’m sort of…

Kevin Prufer (16:00):
I think it’s called Increasingly Improbable, is it that?

Ryo Yamaguchi (16:02):
It’s Increasingly Improbable. Yes, that’s right. That’s right.

Kevin Prufer (16:05):
I can read that one.

Ryo Yamaguchi (16:07):
If you’d be up for it. I don’t know.

Kevin Prufer (16:08):
I’ve never read this one out loud, so that’ll be interesting.

(16:12):
It’s Increasingly Improbable.

(16:16):
What if I never transform from alive to dead? My heart never caves, and the internet of my brain extends indefinitely. What if instead of dying, I grow merely increasingly improbable? My consciousness never snuffed. Its continued existence contingent upon the more and more unlikely circumstances that keep me alive.

(16:46):
Thus, my consciousness persists while the world becomes stranger to accommodate it, the world’s eventual complete weirdness essential to what keeps me alive. Wouldn’t that be something? When I was a teenager and only just awakening to the fact of death, that was the kind of fantasy I indulged in, stories of a perpetually living being inhabiting an increasingly unlikely world that existed only to keep consciousness alive as if the world cared that much for anyone. In my heart, I knew it didn’t, of course not.

(17:32):
For many years, I had a cat Nightingale. Most evenings, I lay in bed and read. Nightingale lay on my chest and purred, thoughtlessly. She was so predictable until one evening she didn’t appear at the porch. The next day too, after a while, I realized Nightingale must be dead. It’s hard to describe the space I will once have filled.

(18:01):
Recently, I drove past my childhood home. Back then it was yellow. Now it is deep blue. Will I be the minute space between those coats of paint, narrow and obliterated? I have written poems and uploaded them to the mind of literature. If they hover in probable silence, I hope it is the silence of thought and not negation.

(18:30):
Once long ago, Nightingale descended those porch steps and disappeared grayly into the night. Each evening I stood on the porch and called into darkness rattling food in her bowl. Then every morning I descended those same steps and got in the car as if nothing had changed for me, as if nothing were missing. Exactly as I still do every day, as I will do tomorrow, and maybe thousands of times after that into the future.

Ryo Yamaguchi (19:08):
Yeah, that’s wonderful. It anchors so much in the collection. I mean, for one, I think, and for folks who haven’t yet read this, the motif of the cat, of Nightingale. I mean, what’s wonderful throughout the collection is that we have sort of viewpoints of different angles, and in some ways different stories, different cats, the one who’s presumed dead because Nightingale who doesn’t return.

(19:32):
But then there’s also just a heart-wrenching scene of putting the cat down at the vet’s office. And then of course, also the gift of the kitten. And another large question I have in my notes of reading through this is about nihilism and this idea of nothingness. I don’t have a well articulated question for you about this, but I wonder how you feel about the kind of nihilism that happens in these poems, and whether it’s something to embrace or fear in so much absence that’s happening here.

Kevin Prufer (20:05):
I think it’s something to fear. I mean, I think that’s the engine that’s driving the book, even when the poems are funny. I mean, I think some of them are funny. Fear is what drives the book, and it’s fear of missing out, honestly, fear of not being there.

(20:27):
But in another way, I think that when I’m thinking about the book, I’m thinking that it’s also, the book itself is a sort of ars poetica. That the speakers keep reminding the reader that they’re speaking so that they’ll be remembered, and the speaking comes in the form of poems. So there’s a contradiction at work, that by speaking about the speaker’s own eventual absence and negation, the speakers managed to preserve themselves in the pages of book.

(21:00):
So I mean, that was how I kept on thinking about this as I was writing it, that what does writing have to do with preservation, and what does absence have to do with the terror that provokes writing?

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:15):
That’s wonderful. That idea of writing as a form of preservation, which I think also comes some of the later poems too, which it feels like an arrival to that. Earlier, I mean, the poem begins with Creon and Antigone. And so I want to talk also about this vast history too, talking about ancient Rome and some of these stories from antiquity that you write about in the poems.

(21:40):
In particular, this idea, several poems kind of relate to the idea that these Romans feel foreign, that something is lost in translation through these stories. And I was hoping you could kind of articulate that a little bit more or talk about how history features in this work and how you got started on it too. What first interested you in some of these stories?

Kevin Prufer (22:03):
Yeah, I could tell you about that. About 30 years ago, well, my father was an archeologist, and so I grew up in this house full of artifacts. A lot of them, I think people would say today were sort of unethically displayed. We had lots of human remains in the basement from digs, and then ancient pots and coins and all kinds of things all around the house.

(22:31):
And I didn’t really notice it or care much about it, except my friends thought it was weird. But then one day, years after I had moved out of the house and had just an average kind of interest in history, I was in Bath, England, and I was sitting in the Roman baths. They were built in the, I believe, the first century AD.

(22:58):
In order to enter what then had been street level, just to enter the baths at the street level, you have to go down about 40 feet because 2000 years of garbage in the streets and repaving the roads has lifted the street level. So it felt so weird to be going downward into this deep space that also was entering out onto a Roman street.

(23:26):
And I was sitting there around the baths, and I was listening to the water, which you can still hear coming through the ancient lead pipes. It’s never stopped coming. And I had the only thing that’s ever been in my life felt like an actual epiphany. I’m not really a spiritual guy, but something weird happened.

(23:43):
And I just, I don’t know how long I sat there, but in that time, my brain just rewired itself. I can’t describe it in any other way, but my brain was completely rewired, and I came out and I felt like I had a weird experience of time travel. But when I came out of it was like I had lost this amazing experience of a different time, and I was obsessed with getting it back again.

(24:13):
I know it was an illusion, something in my brain acting funny, but I tried to recreate ancient Rome. So for years, I was obsessed with it. It was the only thing I read was ancient Roman history. It’s all I talked about. I annoyed people with it, and I would lie in bed and try to reconstruct particular neighborhoods of ancient Rome in my mind based on these three-dimensional maps I would look at. It was crazy.

(24:37):
But I think that’s where a lot of the poems come from, that sense of the collision of the ancient past and the sense of something that we can approximate in language and we can talk about as readers or archeologists or whatever, but that is in some ways utterly foreign and utterly irretrievable. It’s irretrievability that I think is really central to the book is even as you try to retrieve it. In that same way that even as you try to think about negation… In writing, you somehow negate the negation. It’s sort of complicated.

Ryo Yamaguchi (25:17):
That makes absolute sense to me. Well, the via negativa negativa or something, maybe I’m inclined to want to seek an answer that the ancient Romans are trying to deliver to us. Maybe in some ways, I feel that we are in an uncanny way, recapitulating some form of those ancient brutalities.

(25:34):
But the speaker, because the speaker is ambivalent to the Romans, I think, I mean certainly horrified by some of the poem about the exposure of leaving the infant in the wild to die, and the speaker can’t reconcile that morally do you feel that you were being spoken to by them? Do you feel that there was some lesson that you’re supposed to be learning, and therefore, we’re supposed to be learning through these poems or?

Kevin Prufer (25:59):
I don’t know about a particular lesson. I think the poems instead I’m more interested in the kind of poetry that circles an idea and tries to look at the idea from as many angles as it possibly can. Or maybe a poem that circles a question and tries to understand all of the implications of the question without offering a lesson or an answer.

(26:26):
So for instance, in the poems that are thinking about the past is of the past, I mean, I think that’s the question they’re circling is what does it mean to say the dead past? In what ways is it dead? Because it certainly is dead in some ways, and in what ways is it with us? Is it still being filtered through us?

(26:46):
When those speakers in those poems look at the ancient Romans and they begin finding points of similarity, which I think is what we all do. That’s how we understand history, initially, is to say, “Oh, well, this is what we do, and this is maybe not what we do.” As it dawns on the speakers, and maybe in ways that it has dawned on me too, that there are some things about the ancient past that are always going to remain utterly foreign and hard to get our brains around.

(27:12):
Our brains just aren’t the brains of ancient people. Our brains are our brains, and we can’t enter that as much as we want to. And if we could, then there’d be some kind of immortality possible, but we can’t, they’re dead. I think that’s what these speakers are all thinking about.

Ryo Yamaguchi (27:33):
I mean, I guess I also raised the question of history, because I feel that we are in a highly self-aware historical moment just as a society, as a culture. I think there’s one part of it is a doomsday-ness. I mean, we’re all aware of climate change and political upheaval and everything that we’re dealing with.

(27:52):
Then another version of it is the messianic vision of technology that will, say, a ChatGBT is going to make all of our lives better or destroy us. Same thing. And I’m curious, of course, what comes in that that is also in the fears, I think is going through an election, and I presume to be, it’s the Trump election, and then of course, also the pandemic, and there are some pandemic poems in here too.

(28:16):
I was curious if you could talk a little bit about that continuity with those moments of contemporary history and the way that you maybe in relation to ancient Rome or just how that part of history features among all these other poems about mummies and the death of the fathers.

Kevin Prufer (28:34):
I mean, it’s hard not to have our contemporary moment influence what I’m writing about.

Ryo Yamaguchi (28:42):
It’s a fair answer.

Kevin Prufer (28:46):
The Trump election for me was I couldn’t understand it, and I wanted to understand it. I really wanted to understand what had happened and what was happening, but I couldn’t, and I think I started writing poems, not of outrage about Trump.

(29:03):
I mean, I was outraged for sure, but that wasn’t really artistically productive for me, outrage. For me, outrage always leads to something simple, like something simple is not interesting to me. I mean, for me, outrage is rarely complex. I know it can be for other people, I just get pissed. But trying to understand that’s always really helpful. Poetry does help me understand.

(29:31):
So I started to try to write poems that we’re trying to understand our present moment with the tools that I had and the tools that I have are mostly history. So it made sense in these poems to try to understand the present moment through the past and then to fail to do so. The poems always fail to understand, but again, it’s the exercise that’s important, not the lesson.

(29:57):
I mean, at best they can come up with is a metaphor and the mysteriousness in which you try to understand one thing in terms of another or in terms of the force field that’s created between those two things in the metaphor, that’s the best I can do. And partly the metaphor is this time is, in some ways, like and unlike that time. I know that’s not strictly speaking a metaphor, but it’s sort of having the same power.

Ryo Yamaguchi (30:28):
In thinking through that, I guess I’m also seeking an emotional core to them or some, or maybe even a vulnerability or something like that in the uncertainties that you’re talking about. Where it’s like, well, we’re going to circle around a question and that kind of thing.

(30:45):
I guess I’m curious if there was anything that was particularly hard for you to write about in these poems. I mean, with poems that are about so many lost loved ones and things like that.

Kevin Prufer (31:02):
I don’t think that these were hard for me to write. I mean, they were hard in that they took a lot of effort and a lot of revising and-

Ryo Yamaguchi (31:10):
Artistic effort, yeah.

Kevin Prufer (31:11):
I mean, that kind of effort. But I think what happened was when I made the decision many years ago after my first book came out to no longer write about myself, because, well, I think in my training about poetry, I learned a couple of dumb things and I had to unlearn them.

(31:37):
One of them is that a poem ought to be a secret code you have to crack or a puzzle you have to solve. And thinking that would suggests that poems are only interesting to people who like to solve puzzles or crack codes, which is a small group of people.

(31:52):
It seemed to me that a poem really ought to be a very earnest kind of communication about something important. Why else would you write a poem if you’re not trying to communicate? Poems might come out difficult.

(32:03):
Probably, it’s difficult not to be difficult, but because the subject matter is so complex. What is our present moment? What does Donald Trump mean? I mean, those are really complicated questions if you’re going to be at all honest about them.

(32:21):
I think the other thing I learned was that poetry ought to be about the poet, and that’s one of those things I think we inherited from the Romantics or maybe from the Confessionals or whatever, but I think I had this realization that the world of the not me was way more interesting than the world of the me. And the minds of other people are probably way more interesting than my own mind.

(32:45):
At least to me, because I don’t know their mind. So that’s really interesting. I know my mind, it’s not that interesting, but that allowed these poems not to be difficult.

(32:54):
To answer your question, they weren’t difficult for me to write, because I always felt like I was exploring somebody else’s mind and some other circumstances and how another person would respond, and for me, that’s really exciting. It’s like getting to know somebody.

Ryo Yamaguchi (33:14):
That’s wonderful. I love this. Well, I mean, I love this as something that, well, I don’t know, breaking down those received strictures of what it is to be a poet or something, or what a poem can do. I love how much that can broaden its possibilities. But also, like you’re saying too, I think there’s something magnanimous, I don’t know, about leaving oneself and moving into the mind of someone else or writing about topics just for the curiosity of that topic and wanting to know.

Kevin Prufer (33:44):
It’s fun. I mean, it’s fun also to say, “Who are we dealing with here? Who is this person? What are this person’s concerns?” I mean, I know other poets need to write about themselves. I don’t want to belittle that. I mean, I think that’s really important. I mean-

Ryo Yamaguchi (33:57):
Sure.

Kevin Prufer (33:58):
… all kinds of reasons. It’s important to be able to write about yourself and for political reasons and personal reasons and justice reasons. But it’s just that, for me, it’s always been about learning another mind or creating one and then acknowledge you ultimately that the real, underneath it all, of course, they’re my concerns. I mean, I’m scared of all the things the speakers in these poems are scared of, for sure.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:29):
Absolutely, and of course, I know I have that impulse to want to be like, “Well, but what is the psychoanalysis of the poem then?” In which case, whatever to get underneath it, and maybe that’s just not a necessary approach. I like leaving it at this, I leaving it that the poem has created this really wonderful and just thought-provoking world.

(34:48):
Like I said, there’s so many other questions I have here about the motif of glitter, for instance, which is something I want to talk about, everything glitters in this book, the snow is… Well, let me ask you about it really quickly. What’s with glitter?

Kevin Prufer (35:00):
I don’t know. It’s so funny because I just got the copy edits for this novel that I have coming out, and that copy editor said, “You have to stop using the word glitter.” I mean, I’m real interested in meanness. Just the meanness of the world and meanness in people is really interesting to me, and I found that I was often using glitter as a way of talking about meanness that-

Ryo Yamaguchi (35:28):
Interesting.

Kevin Prufer (35:29):
[inaudible 00:35:29] in the darkness that seems to be smiling at you, or that little sparkle in the distance that suggests a lightness, a light that isn’t really there because it’s really dark. I find that to be an ominous word. Now, that’s just personal, but I think that’s how I’m deploying it, as they say.

Ryo Yamaguchi (35:49):
Yeah, I had that sense too, that there was something nefarious about it. It was a smoke screen for something else or that kind of thing. It’s the static of the television in Poltergeist or something. That’s the glitter or something.

Kevin Prufer (36:03):
Yeah. That’s how it is for me too, where it’s like the sunlight coming through the little bag at the top with the IV tube that goes down into the patient’s vein.

Ryo Yamaguchi (36:11):
Oh, yeah, that’s really good. That’s wonderful. I would delight in that. Well, there’s so many other things that we could explore in this that I would love to talk about. I see us rolling up here on the time, and so maybe I just leave it at this perhaps and leave it just open and let the poems breathe and let the structure of this book live and articulate itself over it feels like it’s self-articulating a lot.

(36:33):
I’ll be eager to go back and read it again. I don’t know. Do you want to close this out then perhaps with another reading? The December of Black Pines is another one of my favorites. That’s one with the-

Kevin Prufer (36:43):
It’s a little shorter, I think, isn’t it?

Ryo Yamaguchi (36:46):
Yeah, a little bit.

Kevin Prufer (36:48):
That one’s that weird one that has… That begins with thinking about the moon, somebody’s head in a police car, and then you realize that it’s the father’s head in the actual police car that’s being remembered.

Ryo Yamaguchi (37:03):
It’s such a great reveal at the end of the poem of where that image comes from.

Kevin Prufer (37:07):
I don’t even know how that happened. It just happened.

Ryo Yamaguchi (37:12):
That’s amazing.

Kevin Prufer (37:12):
I’ll read that. Well, thank you. I mean, I’ll read that one because that was a little bit shorter. I should say it has those plus signs that… I always imagine that every section is in addition to the previous section.

Ryo Yamaguchi (37:24):
That’s great.

Kevin Prufer (37:24):
[inaudible 00:37:25] imaginary equal sign. I was really grateful that y’all-

Ryo Yamaguchi (37:26):
That the poem was additive.

Kevin Prufer (37:30):
I was so grateful that you had Copper Canyon let me do it, because I had a press once that insisted on weird little ding bats and the pluses have meaning there. Anyway, I’ll read it.

Ryo Yamaguchi (37:41):
[inaudible 00:37:41] too, because the lines flow through them too in a way. Well, in any case, [inaudible 00:37:44] we hear.

Kevin Prufer (37:44):
They jump over the pluses.

(37:48):
A distant row of black pines. When he was very drunk, my father told me how he held another’s man’s head underwater until that man’s entire body shuddered and relaxed, and only his leg twitched on the muddy riverbank.

(38:06):
“Anyway,” he said, “it was a long time ago. Time passes. That’s the thing about time.” The bar was nearly empty. For a long while, he looked into the glittering rows of bottles. “Drink up,” he said at last, fishing in his pocket for his keys. “Drink up.”

(38:27):
“Is your fingernail a part of your body?” the professor asked pretending to examine the of her perfectly manicured hand. “What about when you trim your fingernails? Are the clippings part of your body?” I was watching very closely as a fat, black ant crawled across my open textbook.

(38:49):
“What if they are false fingernails? What if your hand is prosthetic? Are they part of you? Are the microorganisms in your gut? What I’m trying to say,” she said, “is that the borders of your body are not clear. What I’m trying to say is that the moon is certainly not your body, but the cell phone you’re holding is perhaps as much a part of your body as your fingernails.”

(39:17):
And so she went on until class ended and I closed my textbook over the body of the ant. There, in the lecture hall, my mind held an image of the moon. But the moon kept flickering. It would not hold its place. It became something else, a white face in a receding patrol car window. I remembered.

(39:43):
The moon, it turned out was, not a part of my body, though I could hold it in my thoughts before it shifted, though its likeness filled my mind as mist must have filled a distant forest one evening. Years ago, my father rising from the bank and disappearing finally into the black pines.

(40:05):
The mind rests there at the river bank where that body, it had been, in fact, a soldier, has just stopped twitching. Or at that moment when the professor told us our bodies are merely relational, that they don’t exist beyond their relations in the same way that car refers only to a complex relationship between wheels, bumpers, engines, etc.

(40:32):
She was a thin woman, about 40, black hair, bright red fingernails and lipstick. My eyes lingered on her body as she spoke.

(40:41):
“Your mother,” he said, “is not going to be happy with us,” as he pulled from the parking lot into the street. The sodium lights glittered. It had begun to rain. “I’m sorry about what I said back there. It was all bullshit,” and he laughed, “I never killed anybody.”

(41:02):
The road was long and black. He was talking about other things now, some whore he met in Frankfurt, long before I knew your mother, best part of the war. The image of fingernail clippings drifting to the floor, the click of her heels as she walked from the podium and rustling of backpacks.

(41:26):
My father didn’t notice at first the blue lights, the siren behind us. “Come on,” he told the cop who escorted him to the patrol car, “I had two drinks.” The cop, surprisingly gentle, cuffed him and led him away from me, and then she was helping my father’s heavy body into the backseat, closing the door, his moon-like face, pressed now to the window, his breath fogging the glass, an image that returns to me frequently.

(41:59):
The police car pulling into the bodiless night, receding while I stood for a moment at the edge of the windy highway and a distant row of black pines swayed like a chorus.

Ryo Yamaguchi (42:17):
Oh, yeah. It’s so terrific. The fingernail, I forgot about the fingernail. The way that the motifs of the images, I mean, it’s just so strong and there’s just a joy to it, even for as dark as the scene is. I mean, those dark pines are, there’s nothing more ominous than that image, I don’t think, I like [inaudible 00:42:37].

Kevin Prufer (42:36):
Thank you. I love that father in that poem that he just I still don’t know whether he lied about that body or not. He might have.

Ryo Yamaguchi (42:46):
It’s so funny. I’ve known that person. I have, I know in my life, always on for yarn or something. That’s really good. Well, thank you so much, Kevin. There’s so much more to explore in The Fears.

(42:58):
I really love this book so much for exactly the microcosm that we just presented in that poem, for the way that all these elements work together and interact and subvert each other and all these things. It’s just really, really wonderful, and I had a really fun conversation, going to talk about some of those elements today, so thank you very much.

Kevin Prufer (43:15):
Thank you. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the really good questions, so thank you.

Ryo Yamaguchi (43:19):
Thanks, Kevin, and thank all y’all out there. I hope this is a good episode for you. Please read these poems. Read the book as I have done many times in a single sitting, just straight through. It’s really wonderful, and we’ll see you next time for the next episode. Thanks.

[End Transcript]