5 Questions with … Joshua Clover

April is National Poetry Month, and in honor of the celebration, MUSE talked to UC Davis English professor and poet Joshua Clover, the author of poetry books Madonna anno domini and The Totality for Kids.

1. What first inspired you to begin writing poetry?

I’m not sure I really believe in inspiration, either when one begins writing poetry or for any given poem. People have been writing poems for millennia; it’s one of the things on the menu, like raspberries or riding a bicycle. I like those, too.

2. What is it that you love most about poetry and why?

For me, poetry is a mode of thought – a subset of the general category of thinking. It’s particularly good for thinking about some things and less so for others. The thing that makes poetry poetry and not something else is the way it sets up language structures – shapes, sounds, forms, arrangements on the page – and then moves through them, tries to make the structures feel and think, tries to think and feel those structures.

That sensation of “moving through structure“ … well, it sounds sort of abstract, but it’s not. It’s a decent description of living in the world, of living in history, inside the social matrix, inside an economic system. These are the most concrete situations, where the actual stuff of life takes place – I keep on going back to poetry to think them through … Poetry is such a remarkable tool; it reaches after what wants to hide itself, what wants to escape.

3. Can you describe the process you go through when writing a poem – from your first thought on a particular subject to when you set the pen down to finish?

Probably not. It’s a little opaque to me. The first thing I should say is, I haven’t used a pen in years; can’t read my own handwriting. A poem usually starts with a phrase, a sound, a little rhetorical rhythm. I type it in and see if it proliferates. If it doesn’t, I save it for future occasion, a useful pebble. My work habits are a little uneven, but I’ll try and sit with the proto-poem a little bit each day, an hour maybe. I move very slowly. A line, two lines. I never write through to the end and then go back and fill things in; I know that works for some people, but for myself, I can’t imagine knowing what a poem is about when I start it.

There’s a way that it just doesn’t matter where you start. I could start writing a poem about how the moon is made of marmalade, or begin a sestina just because I think the world really needs one more sestina. For me what’s important is not to exclude; not to have the thought that poetry is supposed to do this, or not do that.

4. You have two collections of poems published (Madonna anno domini and The Totality for Kids). For someone who isn’t familiar with them, how would you describe the main theme of each and which would you say was your favorite to put together?

Critics who have written about these books probably have a better idea than I do. They feel very different to me, and I am more interested by the more recent one (The Totality for Kids), but that’s true of every poet. I think one underlying continuity is an interest in the modern, urban scene, and how it arises out of a dynamic that’s really devastating and requires all kinds of illusions and misrecognitions, but is also filled with real pleasures and sensual allure and mystery. Modernity is awful, so one has to take very seriously the question: Why do we stay?

5. If you could have lunch with any major poet in history, who would it be and why?

Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, a French poet from the late 18th century who would acquire as much political power as any poet in history, albeit very briefly; he was beheaded in 1794. “He who makes a revolution by halves digs his own grave,“ he said, and also, “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.“ I would like to speak with him about terror.

MARIO LUGO can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.