the transcript
Carmen Giménez (CG): Graywolf is a nonprofit publisher, which means that donations enable our editors to acquire, edit, and publish books based on their literary merit. We are grateful that people across the country share our commitment to publishing risk taking literature. Our commitment to independence is possible because of you.
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Thanks again for listening.
Today I'll be talking about literary friendship with my dear friend of twenty-five years, poet Mark Wunderlich. We'll hear from writers Jericho Brown, Michael Dumanis, Ander Monson, Manuel Muñoz, and Brenda Shaughnessy about the writerly bonds that helped shape their view.
Thanks for joining me today, Mark. We've talked a good deal about the significance of friendships like those between Fran Lebowitz and Toni Morrison, Helen Hunt Jackson and Emily Dickinson.
I remember that we met through Rick Barrett at a restaurant in Palo Alto. When I saw you, I first thought Norse God, and then I thought I would like that person to be my friend.
Mark Wunderlich (MW): (laughs) Well, I can't really comment on the Norse God, but, I have to say, I have a vague memory of first meeting you in a group, but that really didn't register.
But what I do remember very well is what happened next. And that is that you called me and asked me if I would like to have lunch, it was quite formal, in that let's have lunch and see if we are going to be friends.
I remember, it was in San Francisco. And I know that we talked about poetry, and it was, surprisingly formal given the ways in which our friendship has developed and the many different things we've been through, the many intimacies and permutations that we've been part of in each other's lives.
But it was very deliberate, this idea, like, “let's see if we can be friends” date. And indeed, I, I remember that I left that day thinking, yes, this is someone who I want to be friends with.
CG: Yeah. I remember that you used the word insouciant, which I had never heard before, and I was like, this person is amazing.
And there was a way in which like, even in those moments of the formal, arranged marriage lunch that we had, it was like, Oh yeah, we have banter. And I, I really loved that.
Another significant memory for me, and it's significant in terms of thinking about our friendship and also just a formative memory for me is sitting near the window of your apartment in San Francisco, and our chairs were across from one another, and I had shared some poems with you that I had been working on. And as you know, graduate school had been pretty traumatic for me. At that point, I didn't know if I wanted to be a writer and I could have gone either way.
I could have walked away and pursued something else. And so, you were someone that I deeply admired. I had seen you talk about poetry before and reeling off Rilke and, you know, I thought this is a genius. And so, I very tentatively shared some poems with you, and you spoke to me with such care and tenderness and rigor, and you were honest, but I felt great intention in what you said. And for the first time, I felt seen by a peer as a poet who I deeply admired, and I remember reading your book, The Anchorage, and I remember this passage, there are lots of memories I have from that book, just the way that you're able to vivify an image, but one passage that resonated for me, both as a human and as a poet was from the poem “Given in Person Only.”
And I'm just going to read from that: “I'll remake myself once again, shed rapture and sweet release and replace it with something equally consummate and strange. So let the city do as it must and break us down to dust and skeletons, I'm just beginning.”
And I remember reading that in my little apartment on 19th and Dolores, because I was only like three or four blocks away from you, and I thought to myself, I know that, like, this is someone that I'm going to meet, that I'm going to know.
And when I read that poem, and others, I also see the thread of your influence in my own work. So it's the combination of your tenderness and a deep admiration for your gift as the poet offering your vision that was such a huge part of keeping me at the work of becoming a writer. And so often as a writer, and frankly at life, which you know because I text you like, how do I write this email? Or how do I speak to this person? And I'm not alone in this. I think, what would Mark say? Or what would Mark do?
MW: Well, I feel like we're in couples therapy or something, and we've just been asked to say something nice about each other. So this is what we get to do today. You know, Carmen, I, I remember so distinctly early on just thinking you were one of the funniest people I had ever met. And also so serious about the making of poems and the making of art and that I thought, wow, I get to have both of these things in one person. That we get to have, a kind of really fun and irreverent sense of humor, we get to exercise with each other, but also we get to meet each other on the level of poetry as, as peers in that way, as people who are going to embark on this together. And that is actually what has happened, we are doing this with each other. We are entwined in each other's poems.
And that I think is really so wonderful and moving. One thing that I always tell my students and actually anybody else who might be interested is that there are only two reasons in the world to write poetry. And of course, the first is for the sheer pleasure of creating something out of nothing, using your imagination and language to make literature.
So the first reason is that writing poetry gives you pleasure. You enjoy the act of it. But the other reason to write poetry is for the company that you get to keep. And sometimes that company is the living. Our living poets, living people, and I remember first reading your poems and, you know, knowing immediately that this was a mind and a sensibility that I wanted to engage with and to know.
And I think that that is the experience that solidified our friendship, my friendships with other poets are really born out of my love and respect for their work. And I think of that didn't exist. It would be very hard for that friendship to thrive. This is that second reason for writing poems is that it, it brings you, to other people.
It connects you and it can even bring you, a really, really, rich friendship.
CG: Yeah, there's nothing funner than sitting around with friends who are writers and talking about life in the same way that sitting in the lyric position, makes it come alive.
And when you look at the great, aesthetic movements, they're artists who come together and they have a shared vision and they support each other. And so, the shared vision is forged as much by the political, and social circumstances and aesthetic circumstances as they are by the connections they have as human beings, by the way, they bolster each other and make each other brave to take risks in their art. And then also by the squabbles that end up happening in many of the aesthetic movements. I think a lot about the Surrealists, of course.
MW: You think about, what a, poetic movement is. It really just starts as people who wanted to hang out. You know, and be with each other and very often these were young people who met each other and are driven to write poems and make poems and to do it as a community through their friendships and their bonds with each other. I feel particularly lucky that I've had many of these that have lasted as long as they have, and that's a real treasure in my life.
Next up, we will hear a brief essay by Brenda Shaughnessy in which she writes about her friendship with the Surrealist painter and poet, Dorothea Tanning.
The two of them met in New York in the 1990s and developed a friendship which was really a kind of cross generational friendship. Dorothea was in her late eighties when they met, and Brenda was in her twenties and the two of them developed a really special friendship over time.
*
Brenda Shaughnessy (BS): I became friends with the Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning thirty years ago in New York City when I was twenty-four and she was eighty-four because I wrote her a fan letter after I'd seen a book of her art at my work-study internship at the Academy of American Poets. I'd never heard of her before. But as soon as I saw her paintings, a chaotic but sturdy bridge was built between what I understood was visible, and what I understood was imaginary. What I mean is, in Dorothea Tanning's hands, the representational and the metaphoric are intertwined. A rose is never just a rose. It's at dinner with a cockroach. A betrayer. Doors may look perfectly like real wood. But they open up onto fears and fantasies. Her women, in particular, are formidable in heft, texture, expression.
It's like they live. Her metaphors, I feel, are stronger, more psychologically relevant than the standard Surrealist Freudian juxtapositions and games of wit and ego between men. I digress. Tanning's metaphors are strong because she knew how to use the objective correlative in paintings. Her objects are unforgettably loaded and emotional.
With a gravitational pull, I feel something when I look at her work. And I don't always know what I feel. That's the beauty. She mixed intellect and emotion, desire and practicality on the canvas before it was cool. A painting could be a domestic scene with splashes of magic and rage. Or a realistic landscape with an otherworldly perspective.
Dorothea's work irreversibly made clear to me the power of the single page, panel, canvas. That it could be a narrative, extending off the edges, beyond the picture. The same way a single rectangle of poem could open into a portal of imagination, memory. A whole story invisibly seeping through its two mere dimensions.
You could think about a single painting for hours, the same way you might immerse in a novel or savor a conversation much later. Her work showed me it was possible to make a page a world. I was a young poet, gullible and green. I could so easily have joined any cult that I happened upon. I was so willing to believe, with no real evidence, I was willing to believe that it was possible to make poetry and creative work the center of my life.
How lucky I was to have found my friend Dorothea, who believed I could do it, who validated my dreams. And she wanted to share her sheaves of stories and experiences with me, to tell me how her dreams had been lived decades before I was born. She gave me advice from the 1940s, showed me Garbo movies from the ’30s, and taught me the timeless skill of properly opening a bottle of champagne.
We read each other's poems, often aloud, discussing them, defending drafts, promising rewrites, so excited when one of our poems really took off. That was the best. We dreamed of becoming poets at her kitchen table or in her TV room, as if our poems, line by line, were writing a story about us becoming poets.
I swear, it felt like being teenage girls together, sighing and swooning. She published two beautiful books of poems with Graywolf in her nineties. I guess close friendships between the young and the elderly are uncommon outside of the usual institutions like family or academia. But a young person needs models to know what's possible, and Dorothea knew that.
She showed me it's possible to be an artist. She did not show me the path or clear the path. She showed me how to visualize the path, that I had to create it myself in order to take it to get anywhere. I can't even imagine what my life in poetry would be like if I hadn't met her. Where would I have put all this love, this swoon I still have for her, all this time?
*
CG: Welcome back. We just heard from Brenda Shaughnessy, whose new and selected poems Liquid Flesh was published in 2022. And it features work from her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy, which is the title of a painting by Dorothea Tanning. And it's also the cover image. I love that book. It's so painterly and you can read the influence and the conversation that Brenda was having with her as an artist.
MW: I love how that friendship that they had was really something that crossed generations and Brenda's work really responded to these paintings. I think that the influence on Brenda's work was that, seeing those paintings by Dorothea Tanning and getting to know her, that Brenda's work became even more strange and original as a result of that relationship. And that's something I love about that friendship and that we get to read in her poems.
CG: And you know what I remember, Mark, is that Brenda came to your class in San Francisco and you said, you need to meet Brenda Shaughnessy. And so you invited me. To the class because you knew that we would connect.
And so that was also really formative. And because I remember reading that poem, that book and just like, Oh yeah, I don't, I've never seen poetry like this. And this is so much of what I need and wanted and you brought us together. And that's another enduring friendship from that time.
MW: I think that your work, yours and Brenda's work has some real affinities, particularly when it comes to sound and the ways in which you both play with sound in your poems.
It brings you in connection, to other people and allows you to meet and move through the world by connecting with other poets.
CG: It's interesting to think about writers, too, whose work you wouldn't think of having much commonality. But they're able to forge friendships and think about, those correspondences.
MW: I think that that's a really good lead-in for our next guests. And Carmen, I think you're going to introduce them.
CG: Next up, we have Ander Monson, who is the author of most recently predator, a memoir, a movie, an obsession, and teaches with Manuel Muñoz at the university of Arizona. And Manuel is the author of the story collection, The Consequences, and he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 2023. And they're going to talk about their long friendship that's been forged through teaching and writing.
Ander Monson (AM): Hey, Manuel.
Manuel Muñoz (MM): Hey, Ander. How are you?
AM: I'm doing well. I'm glad we get the chance here to talk about our rivalry slash friendship.
MM: A rivalry slash friendship, but there's more friendship. I have a feeling that's what we're going to settle on.
AM: Yes, absolutely.
MM: Both of us teach at the University of Arizona and, we've been there since 2008. That's when we met, but I guess maybe the question I would have for you is when did we become aware of each other?
AM: You mean before, we came to Tucson?
MM: Yeah, before we came to Tucson, because I remember when it was announced that we were all coming in, there was a group of seven of us coming in as scholars. I went to Google everybody, because we weren't all writers, and I wanted to know who you were.
AM: I remember meeting everyone, during the orientation thing, but maybe even before then, I think I'd contacted you and we went to the beeline, in Tucson, just because I wanted to know who this guy was, who also incidentally, as, I'm pretty sure, you know, I applied for your job. Do you know that?
MM: No, I didn't know that.
AM: Oh yeah. And so I'm like, I'm like, who is this son of a bitch? Who took the job—
MM: I remember the first instance of Googling you because, I was still in New York and I remember being at my desk and looking at my potential colleagues thinking to myself, I'm going to make a whole new set of friends. I'm going to leave New York, and this is going to be a different thing.
I was working in publishing before I got into academia. But that instance of knowing that it was going to be a whole new world for me, just made it important.
AM: Yeah. Obviously we are still friends with a lot of the people that in our group that we're hired with.
I remember Alison Deming telling us at the time that these are the people who are going to matter the most to your experience over the next, however many years. And I don't think I would have guessed then that, we'd still be here, whatever, sixteen years later.
But I had wanted to just get to know you one-on-one because as my creative writing colleague, I just wanted to know like how fun of a colleague you were going to be, because at the time, everyone else seemed like they were thirty years older and not particularly interested in interacting with us young hires.
And I remember reading your work on Zigzagger in particular. And I was like, okay, this guy's doing something like very different than what I'm doing, but feeling also a sense of, feeling seen. I think there are some relationships between that book and other electricities, in particular, this real sense of place, And the sense of characters often trapped in the place and then some of the dynamics of that.
And it's really hard to be friends with someone whose work you don't like. I don't know if you feel this way, but I really feel that way if I don't like it, I can be a professional friend, but there's only so far that I can go. And I remember reading, I was like, Oh damn. Yeah. Okay. Like this guy knows what he's doing. And that was a good feeling.
MM: Yeah. You can definitely be a professional friend, Ander, for me, switching careers from publishing into academia I didn't know what it meant to have colleagues and also, having to negotiate the fact that you don't actually have to be friends with your colleagues if you don't want to. You can figure out a way to do your work and separate it from all of that and still be who you want to be. But I found it very easy to trust what was going to come. I mean, that's a, that's a very complicated way of saying, I liked you immediately. One of the things that I appreciated most about you was the surprise that I kept asking myself, if we had known each other in another, in another context, would we be friends?
And my instinct is to say, no, because my feeling is I have my walls up. I take a little while to trust people to come in. There was something about, your willingness to, let's go have dinner. Let's seek each other out. That prompted me to say, Hey, this is someone who can be more than a colleague. And it doesn't have to be just talking about work and complaining about situations at work. We can get outside of all of that and just be people.
And, I appreciated that coming from New York and feeling very, feeling very lonely. I was like, yeah, this is a person I can trust and, I can get along with and, become friends with.
I have more to say about it too, because just in terms of breaking down walls, you don't take yourself seriously.
And I love that clash. I've always said to you, taking myself seriously doesn't mean that I'm arrogant or I'm full of self-regard. But I've seen myself be in this world where I feel like people don't regard me very much. And it's become a defense mechanism.
And in some ways, you helped me break it down. It's like, just be a little freer. Let people make fun of you. Let, let people, gently mock you into a friendship. Like all, all of that becomes sustaining.
You invited me to do a Thanksgiving run. It was a turkey trot. And the moment you said that you were going to be running this race in a costume is the moment it's like, okay, I'm going to have to run in a costume too. Just to, to sort of match your energy. And I didn't really have that before with other friendships people encouraging me to break down the walls.
AM: That's one of the many iconic photos of you and I as you in the booty shorts and me and the tiger costume running this race, which you know, it's a turkey trot, so it's not that serious of a race anyway. But that was a delightful memory. Both because you'd never run, I think, any kind of race before is my understanding, but we're also just like willing to sign on to this fairly stupid seeming idea of which I have a lot.
I'm wearing your Joyce Carol Oates shirt here today. I'm also wearing the shorts by the way. I really like, you know, for the listeners, I've come to really like to make like merch for my friends.
And so, I made this shirt for you, on the occasion of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. And the shorts are, they're a little brief. But I do, very much do like the idea of trying to, I don't know, bring other people along into spaces that I'm also not that comfortable in.
I mean, I'm not like a good runner or someone that serious, about running. And so, I feel like if you're going to do something like that, the only way to do it is to go all in and just have fun with the experience. I could see that you were kind of like, trying something that in no world could I really imagine you doing that? And that impressed me a great deal and also made for a great photo, too.
MM: Yeah, and it's not that I wanted to impress you. It was just this very natural invitation that you were making I think for a while it was a buildup. I mean, one story I like to share for, for people who don't know me very well, is a lot of people don't realize that in my mid-thirties, I didn't celebrate my birthday for a long time because of a very melodramatic moment when an ex forgot my birthday.
And as a way to forget the pain of that day, I never allowed anybody to throw me a birthday party. And I remember being in the backyard and this was early in the friendship and we were, by your pool in the midst of Tucson summer. And you kept pushing back on this idea. And I remember you said this, you said, let people love you.
And I thought it was so sweet because that's not the first word that people might associate or make the association with you in terms of your friendships, but that's exactly what it was. And I, let the wall down on that one too. I still don't allow you guys to give me gifts. But it's like, yeah, you can, you can let people celebrate you, and honor you a little bit.
That's been a good thing, for me to see.
AM: Yeah. I think there's so much I want to talk about. Like I came into this, Oh man, what are we going to talk about? But there's actually a lot I want to talk about. I actually don't know if our friendship is a literary friendship as much as it is just a friendship between people that are in the literary world, kind of in different parts of it. And there are certainly times when I'm attempting to amplify our friendship into like a literary rivalry, mainly for show and for my own entertainment.
I like a certain amount of fun. Competition, like when you won the MacArthur, the rivalry is going poorly for me and, and well for you at the moment. But I, I think we should maybe try to talk about how each other show up in our work if at all. And one thing I would like to just note is I really came to admire like we're kind of opposites in our drafting strategies and our strategies of sending work into the world.
You know, I'll just send anything out almost. Like in a manic burst. And your process, which I so admire, is to keep it very close until it is done. And then it goes out. It isn't kind of like polar opposite to mine, although I've been trying to move in the direction of maybe having a little bit more, I don't know, self-control or quality control, or just holding things a little bit longer, which is not always my strong suit.
But that is the thing that I've learned from you, or I'm trying to learn from you and your work. That I wanted you to hear.
MM: Likewise, I mean, because that's the other thing, is that, you remember the day, it was probably maybe two or three years ago, when I happened to come into a coffee shop, and you were there working. And, I felt terrible about interrupting you, but I came away from that moment thinking, Ander does this on the daily.
He is on it. And I'm not always doing that. I can't always do that, but there are moments of those bursts of inspiration of just being, in your orbit where I do think to myself, yeah, there's a way to change this up to, come to the page, more frequently. And maybe with a little more trust in myself, because that's what I see when I see you is not any issues of quality control, but it's like, I've got something to say and I'm going to keep saying it and I love the fact that you're always there. You're always on the page, always drafting, always having, a project that's already ready set in motion, even if it's not going to be the final thing. It's in motion.
So I love the fact that our opposite ways of coming together is maybe, what keeps the, friendship so solid. I mean, it's going on sixteen years, and I love the fact that. Here it is, end of April. I'm about to drive back from Austin to Tucson.
And I miss you. I miss you. I can't wait to see you.
AM: It'll be nice to have you back. I mean, glad that you're able to bring your genius to Austin. But there is something missing, in my life when you're gone. And we're not the kind of friends that necessarily talk on the phone.
Although, you know, texting fairly often. There's, you know, more has more to do with a glass of bourbon and maybe a Tina Turner album playing. And that's hard to do from . . . a distance.
MM: Yeah, you know, I mean there's nothing better than listening party, just break out the vinyl and, have something going on in the background. But, yeah, I get my little nip of bourbon, and some conversation and I miss that. I absolutely do.
AM: Well, we'll have it pretty soon. So, you had texted me that photo, was it the psycho project where you were recreating shots from that, which is like actually a really lovely project. I mean, that's the kind of project that I feel that I would be, I was very into this idea. A dumb idea that we're going to do for those who weren't here, you would just, you know, he's probably kind of key shots from psycho and then would have people, his friends recreate them. And it's a shot of me as a state trooper. Whose head pulled you over. And this is the one where I've got my tongue out. I feel like there's one that's more serious.
MM: There's only that one.
AM: Really? Oh, I was trying to follow your, I thought I was trying to like follow your instructions, but I see I only did that partly.
MM: Listen, I'll follow your instructions. If we ever get to your Whitesnake recreation video where I play Tawny Kitaen.
AM: Yes. We can do that this summer. I mean, I think this is like the thing that I love about the Tucson summer. It provides like a certain amount of undirected attention and time along with like a kind of like crushing amount of sun and heat. So that anything seems almost like it could be a good idea done in the summer here.
I'm still 100 percent on board for that. I'm feeling that you're committing here. I know you're not really committing here.
MM: You know, well . . . no. We'll see. We'll see.
AM: And it's also been really great to spend this time together on this podcast. Even if—and by the way, I'm not going to tell any of the students about this—I still plan on maintaining our public literary feud. Such as it is. So only those who are in the know can really know.
MM: Exactly. They'll have to find the podcast, to hear me say, I love you very much, Ander. I really do.
AM: I love you too, man. Looking forward to having you back here soon. Likewise.
*
MW: Welcome back. That was Ander Monson and Manuel Muñoz. And, Carmen, I'm really interested to hear what you think about that conversation. But one thing I will say is I was so impressed by how tender they were with each other, and how they really ended up talking about. What they felt for each other and that's not really what I expected to happen.
CG: I am in my feels for sure. After listening to that conversation, when you work with people, it's hard to sustain that connection because, all of the ways in which you are talking to each other, sometimes having to act against the interest of your colleague, but they've really managed to, and maybe that's part of the reason that they've, you know, that Ander cultivates the rivalry at work is, to guard that, tenderness. So I hope that we're not blowing their cover.
MW: I think we might be blowing their cover a little bit, but I think the cover is not very convincing. I'm sure when they're together, because, just the way they spoke to each other was, what, it was so obvious, how they were connected as friends.
Next up, we have two writers, two poets, who have been friends for a very long time. And if I understand this right they speak to each other every day, or really almost every day. Jericho Brown is the author of The Tradition, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Michael Dumanis is the author of two collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Creature, which was published by Four Way Books in 2023, and he teaches at Bennington College.
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Jericho Brown (JB): Hi, I'm Jericho Brown, and I am in Atlanta, Georgia.
Michael Dumanis (MD): Hi, I'm Michael Dumanis, and I'm in Bennington, Vermont, and Jericho and I are very good friends.
JB: We should start by talking about how we met. I remember exactly how we met because I was, going into the creative writing office.
And you remember these people, Andrew Kozma and Kwang Ho Lee were around. And, at the time a woman named Shatera was the administrative assistant for creative writing. And there had been a lot of upheaval. And I remember meeting you, and y'all sort of were on your way somewhere and you literally backed up in the car.
I think you were with your girlfriend at the time. Y'all backed up in the car and you got back out of the car because you really wanted to say hi, and recognize the fact that I was a new person there because you were a year above me. And that's what I remember about how we actually met. What about you?
MD: Well, that's an exciting memory. That sounds like me, I don't have the same memory, but that's great. What I remember for context, right? It would have been twenty-two years ago. It would have been like August of 2002. I was in my second year in the PhD program at the University of Houston, and I had a classmate who ran into whatever office I was in. I think I was in the Gulf Coast offices, having just become a poetry editor at Gulf Coast. And she ran in and said, I just met a new student and he's so hot. He's so hot. You got to see him. He's so hot. I think you might've been with your sister. There was some woman with you who, you were not dating, who she mistook for your girlfriend. Or, she said she met somebody.
But she said I had to meet you. And I said, okay, I'm going to meet the hot new student, uh, uh, I think we only met for like all of a minute at that point. But I remember introducing myself to you, and that must have been like the first meeting. And then the situation with the car, me passing you and stopping, must have been the second meeting. We probably got to know each other more through being in class together.
JB: Yeah, I think not only that, I think we really became friends, not just, I mean, I think we always got along and we were sort of automatically friends in a way that one poet can indeed meet another poet and, and become fast friends with that poet.
But I also think when we were in classes together, we were always in class volatile classes. Like we had that class with Tony Hoagland where he kept yelling at us, which I'll never forget because I wrote “Prayer of the Backhanded” in that class, this poem ultimately about my father being very violent, and part of the reason why I could write that poem, was because we were dealing with Tony actually, in truth, being violent. I remember one time he said something you were so angry you were about to walk out, and all I wanted was calm. It's like, I was like holding you down on your desk. I was holding your arm like Michael please don't walk out it'll make it even worse.
I remember that was the class we were in when Kwang Ho Lee's mother died. And I remember him finding out that his mother had died and leaving the classroom and me realizing sort of, sitting in class and, instruction had continued. And I was like, Kwang is my friend. Why?
MD: I remember this so vividly. That was specifically what you said. You were sitting next to me and Kwang was led out of the room with bad news. I don't think we knew what the bad news were, but we knew they were very bad news. And, Tony kept talking, a minute went by, and you just looked up and you said audibly, Kwang is my friend. And you stood up and you just ran out after him.
And I remember thinking at that moment. Oh, that is so beautiful. I thought there was something decent and ethical and like humane in that moment. That was something like that was an awareness that developed for me very early on in our friendship. That I thought of you as someone who had these very strong values when it came to, how people should interact with one another about education about.
About a kind of purity in a discourse around poetry that was very important to you. And I think that both of us were pretty unhappy in slightly different ways, but both pretty unhappy in that particular Tony Hoagland classroom at the University of Houston. And I think what I felt was a kind of a shared sense of desire, desire for, every student in that classroom to be given a voice, which we felt was not happening, and for students to be treated fairly and for poetry to be talked about in a way that was respectful of the poets, regardless of whether or not they were student poets are published poets.
And to me, you going after Kwang when he left the classroom was an indicator of this is a really good person. I'm sitting I should be doing what Jericho is doing only I'm not right.
JB: Yes. I just think that you figure out who to lean on and you were just always there for me to lean on.
And I think the reason why we're friends is because, ultimately, because we just love poetry so much. I remember there used to be like this walkway that led to your apartment where you lived in Houston. And we would be standing outside on that walkway talking to each other about a poem for hours. It wouldn't even be our poem. It'd be like something Stevens wrote. We would just be standing there talking for hours. It's like time passed. And I remember loving that so much and feeling so excited that I had found someone who actually felt about poetry as strongly as I did, even when we would disagree about poems, that you felt as strongly as I did about the importance of the poem in the world. Which I think has a lot to do with why we became friends as well.
MD: And that's exactly it. You know, we both are friends with a lot of, other people, right? And we're friends with, a lot of poets. And I think about my conversations with other poets I'm good friends with, and we have great conversations that are often about things that happened, poets we know, or things that happened in the world of poetry to somebody, or about somebody.
And I'm not saying that you and I don't do that too, but we talk so much about actual poems all of the time, like where you'll want to read a poem by somebody else to me, or you send me a poem that you read. It could be a poem by a student. It could be a poem from, poetry daily or, Home a day or a magazine and you just want to talk about it.
And so I would feel, like what you're describing there, standing outside of my place, talking about a poem for a very long time, you would want to talk about the line, or like a phrase, or line breaks. And I feel like I can talk about that endlessly.
And I don't feel self-conscious doing that with you the way that I might with some other people. I would also want to say that while we had that kind of unhappy class that we had together at Houston, we were simultaneously in a different class together with Claudia Rankine, right? Ostensibly about poetic form, but it really wasn't.
I mean, it was about everything, right? And I think that class also was very exhilarating. And I think that Claudia through her assignments in that class kept, trying to get everybody in the class to have some kind of aesthetic breakthrough. To write something that was unlike other poems they had written.
And I remember this moment, when you wrote this poem, “Beneath Me,” and Claudia praised it at length and really went through line by line through the beginning of that first draft of that poem, talking about what was exciting about it. And I was seized with this urge to like, also write a poem.
That kind of attention. I wrote this long poem, the woods are burning, like in my, first book, thinking about all the things that, Claudia said about your poem and thinking, Oh, I want these things to be true, right? So I think we also had this way where we were starting to communicate with one another through our own poems.
And I think one of the things that has really sustained our friendship is that we still—I mean, it's twenty-two years—we still show our poems very early on in the, in the lives of those individual poems. Someone asked me in an interview recently, who sees my work before it's published?
And I said, usually it's three people, right? My spouse sees it. You see it. And sometimes I translated it into Russian for my mother and read it out loud to my mother in Russia. But really the only feedback I usually get these days, I mean, there are exceptions, but I know when I write a poem that before I think the poem is done, Monica Farrell will see it. You will see it and my mother will probably see it. Right. And I'm so honored when you, email me, or text me, usually it's a text message, right? And you say, I have a new poem, or I think I have a poem. And I feel like I've been around for the lives of so many of your poems.
Again, I'm thinking about the title “Poem of the Tradition.” It was still called something like “2014” or “Summer 2014” when I first saw it. And we have like successive conversations about it. I don't know how long. But over months, you would just occasionally send me a new version, and then a new version. We'd be talking about other things in the interim, and then a new version would appear. And I'm amazed by watching the life of a poem that gets to its final state.
JB: Yeah. That poem was probably, a page in some spillage onto a second page, even in the first draft. And you know, I always tell people, if I just keep sending a poem to Michael Dumanis, it turns into a sonnet.
Which is so hilarious considering the fact that if you look at our work, I think it's clear that you're much more of a maximalist and I'm much more of a minimalist. And yet something about our feedback to one another leads you to add things to your poems and leads me to take things out is really fascinating.
MD: I'm curious about you saying that you're a minimalist, because that's not the case in conversation or in energy or in general, right. Or in the poems. In the inventiveness. Like, I think of your poems as very formally inventive and often like taking, taking a risk.
And I don't think of them in terms of silence. Right. But it makes sense to me that like, so you think you're a minimalist because you cut your impulses to cut away as opposed to, to add.
JB: I don't think of myself as a minimalist while I am writing poems. I mean, I understand that there's a way that the poets I love most have a lot of bareness and spareness going on in their work.
If you look back at my poems over the course of the last three books, they're generally one fourth of the page. Do you know what I mean? Like that, even in my conception of the line, I always end up writing an iambic. Without trying, I end up writing iambic tetrameter line. Which is, just less than iambic pentameter, right?
I think there's a way that I'm sort of inside a room and not going outside of that room in order to make a poem happen, that it stays, it's important to me in its form that it stays in the room by the time a poem finishes, though I keep pushing toward a longer poem. You know, the poems that I've been sending you for this next book, I guess, Michael. I'm saying this next book. I've never said that before, but the poems that I've been sending you, I don't know if you've noticed, but they've been longer than any poems I've ever written, which is interesting because they're really only a page and a half long, maybe. But that's longer than what I've done in the past, you know?
MD: When you say, that you're a minimalist. I'm a maximalist. My first thought is that might also be part of it. Is that in showing somebody else work? Why would I want to show work to someone who is exactly like me aesthetically? There is something about us that is very similar in terms of like, our care about each word, our care about enjambment. We both really preached like the gospel of line break. You know, as a, the most important decision one makes in a, in a poem. We both do that, with our students. I feel like we have those shared values about, about musicality, but there's also, places where we differ, which I think is actually what makes the conversation exciting.
You know, we've had a conversation, for example, where I've put emphasis on me really caring that each poem, like when I read a poem, I want it to be interesting. Right. And you've pointed out to me that there is a difference between something being interesting and something being good. I realized that I might actually mistrust the word good a little bit, and you might mistrust the word interesting by itself, I think it's important to say, like, we don't only talk about poetry. We have political viewpoints. We have personal viewpoints. We talk a lot about the world in general. We discuss things that come to us, through the world. And we often find common ground. I'm under the impression that we both really learn from each other and from what we bring.
And there is, this moment, many years ago, I was teaching a class, at Bennington college, and you were zooming into the class. And I don't know if you remember this, but, this just really stayed with me that, a student asked you something maybe about the word relatability that had just like found its way into language, unfortunately, and was being bandied about a lot.
And you said something like relatable, relatable, like you repeated the word a couple of times. And you said to my students, I'm a gay black man from Shreveport, Louisiana, and I used to be a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans, and that's probably a very different experience than any of you have had.
And I don't know why we focus on trying to figure out why we're the same as though the important thing is to be the same. When what's actually beautiful is that we are all incredibly different. And we should acknowledge the difference and celebrate the difference between people. I don't know that had a very profound effect on me hearing you say that.
And I think in our conversations we often give a lot of space for expressing difference. And I think that's also really exciting to me about our friendship.
JB: Yeah. And I think the most important thing for this platform to know is that while we are having this really one long conversation about poetry over twenty-two years, we're also talking about everything else.
We can talk about a reality TV show or whatever limited series we're watching at the same time. Or fashion it's a friendship. And it's not that it's some sort of a poetry collective. It is a friendship where poems are a part of everything because that's what poems are.
And that's what I love most about our friendship, Michael. That we're able to carry poetry. As we would our marriages and our breakups. Do you know what I mean?
MD: I mean, it's that, and I would add that it's also an ongoing conversation. Like, I feel like we're having the same conversation and we just keep taking breaks of a day or two days or a week from it.
But we've really been in the same conversation for twenty-two years, watching it evolve. And I think that's actually something especially exciting to me with our friendship. I think that you're one of the only people I know who still really wants to talk on the phone all the time, you know?
And I feel like I also am, still from a different time in a way where I'm not that comfortable with text messaging, neither are you, right? Though we do it. And really you're the person who, at one in the morning, wants to have a conversation for an hour. You know, on the phone while going about your business and talking about poems and getting a little more tired as the conversation goes on.
And there's something really exhilarating to me about that. And I feel like, like a lot of it is also that just live real-time aspects to our conversation.
JB: Mm hmm. Yeah, because if I'm in line at the Whataburger, you have to deal with that. I'm on the phone.
MD: And that becomes part of the conversation. So even though you're in Atlanta and I'm in Bennington, I feel like we've really managed to constantly be in each other's lives.
JB: Can I exit by saying, Michael, will you please, please—you're going to not do it—you're going to tell me no. But will you please write an essay about translating your poems into Russian to read them to your mother. People on earth need that. I keep telling you. I'm glad that I can publicly tell the world that I beg you to write these essays. I'm glad you're in my life. I love you. Would you please write about that?
MD: That's, that's very sweet, Jericho. We can talk about it on the phone sometime. I'll say that, what I mean when I do that, is that I'm just, I'm synchronously doing it. It's that I look at the words in English and I say them in Russian, as I am talking to her.
I read it in English first, and then I say it. I'm just trying to translate as though this is like the UN or something, and I'm trying to do a synchronous translation.
JB: It has all kinds of implications for what happens to your poems and what we are reading as your reader. That has all kinds of implications for how poems get revised, how they, how they get made.
And I just feel like more should be said about that. Particularly given the state of the immigrant experience, and the state of the immigrant experience in a nation that is becoming more and more fascist. No matter who the president is. I'm sorry. Thank you, Michael.
MD: You are so smart, Jericho, and you are so sweet to me.
JB: Thank you. Thank you. I love you so much. You're the best. I love you too.
*
MW: That was Jericho Brown and Michael Dumanis talking about their friendship, which they, have had for many years now and continue to conduct, over the phone and through many text messages, I guess, all throughout the day. And it was wonderful to hear the ways in which they stay connected over time and space. Carmen, this was, really fascinating hearing all of these people talking about their friendships with each other, the kinds of friendships through which people sustain themselves as writers and poets, people often talk about how lonely it is to be a writer and that it's this sort of solitary activity, but nothing happens in isolation. And I think this podcast really shows the ways in which friendship keep the engines of literature running.
CG: Yeah, it's been so moving and inspiring. And I am going to write to all of my poet friends and say, thank you so much. Because what I hear is just that it's connecting and walking alongside someone.
I have a text thread with the poet Susan Briante and Rosa Alcalá. And ninety percent of what we're talking about is parenting, and our bodies, and life. But underneath all of that lives the inspiration that they both have. They're such powerful poets and it's sustains me. And obviously we have friends who live outside of this world, but it is very meaningful to connect with people that you know are very powerful and gifted and you can do these quick pivots back and forth between what do you do with a sulky teenager? And how do I end this poem? And, I would just say what a lot of people probably say to you is that you have such wisdom, thank you for taking this time today to talk with me.
MW: I also have to say that I found these conversations really moving, and I'm so glad we can stick a fork in the myth of the lonely, solitary, poet or writer, laboring in solitude.
Of course we do write from solitude, but this is really proving the ways in which this artform, the form in which literature brings people together in really meaningful ways. Thank you, Carmen, for having this conversation with me.
CG: Thank you, Mark.
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Thanks for listening to the Graywolf Lab podcast with guests Jericho Brown, Michael Dumanis, Ander Monson, Manuel Muñoz, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Mark Wunderlich. We're looking forward to an episode with Roger Reeves this fall. So, make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening to it.
Visit graywolflab.org to explore our first theme, “Time.” We're posting new poems, essays, stories, graphics, and interactive pieces every week. And later this year, we'll roll out the next theme for Lab Online, which is “Games.”
So please stay tuned. Our music is from “Expiation” from the album Terrain by Jacob Cooper.
There's a short feature on Jacob Cooper's music on the lab site. Thanks to our podcast producer, Edie French of iDream.tv. And thanks to the donors who have generously contributed to Graywolf Lab.
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