Interview by Lex Schroeder
This past October I interviewed my brother Nicholas on writing and the creative process. We ended up talking about persimmons, pain, squirrels, Nicholson Baker, and trust, among other things. My feeling after our conversation was that it all really comes back to the earth. I continue to feel this way. I followed up with Nick by phone this week to see what’s changed for him since then about poetry and life. We’ve both been reading a lot of Jack Gilbert, so I’m not surprised Jack shows up. We continue the conversation around pain. I find out we feel differently about gardens.
LS: What’s changed for you about poetry since we last spoke?
Nicholas Schroeder: What’s changed is that I read a line of poetry which asked, “What are we to do about loveliness?” And I think that’s an important question. I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t anticipate knowing how to answer it soon—nor do I want to—and I think the last time we spoke I might have been so brash and passionate about poetry that I would have constructed an answer, which would have been a lie, but still would have worked… But what I’m saying now is I don’t know the answer.
LS: Who said it?
NS: Jack Gilbert asked it.
LS: What do you appreciate about Jack Gilbert?
NS: Oh, I think he is fearful and fearless and just the right amount of desperate in his infatuations. And also he’s a devotee to the experience of pain, a reluctant devotee, but a devotee. So I like that, and often he reminds me of myself regarding the steeps of love that I’ve felt and unfelt in my own life. And the women.
LS: Have you been doing any gardening?
NS: No, but I did buy a minor plot of baby kale yesterday for Mariah, and I gave it to her. I’m concerned it won’t find its way to a pot of soil, it might just stay in its transient state, its minor plot. And this baby kale has a few uses in our life. To eat it directly, feed it to my tortoise, and I suppose celebrate it as a sort of totem of our love. So that’s the only gardening I feel like I’ve been doing.
LS: What do you think the connection between poetry and gardening is?
NS: I’ve wondered this because a lot of the poems that you seem to gravitate toward contain a lot of images having to do with the natural world and its function, and what I have always wondered is how do I, the reader, unpack this natural metaphor to mean something having to do exclusively with my life? Which very often is a social experience or a loving experience, but very rarely has anything to do with just gardening. The temptation now is to resist the reading that there must be an overarching metaphor, and that sometimes a garden is merely a garden, and its natural processes should be ones which I feel comfortable taking at face value. This thing undergoes a process, other things might also undergo a process. It’s not for the poet or the reader to necessarily draw an acute connection between the two, and I think you can sometimes be a fool for doing so.
Gardening, for me, has never been the most important thing in my life [Laughs]. It’s because I’ve never lived a life that can hold a garden. And maybe that speaks to my irascibility as a human or that I’m not a wealthy man, nor have I ever been. Nonetheless, gardening has no place for me… from me. [Laughs]
LS: What are you learning about the way energy works in poems or anything else?
NS: Well, I’ve been wearing a lot of black recently. Personally, I’ve been dreading the question—which is an obvious question, and nobody has asked it of me directly at least—“Why are you wearing so much black?” I don’t know the answer to that question… Who was it? Somebody’s wife wore black until she died, once he died. That could be said about so many people. But I am aware that what black does is obstruct the transmission, the natural function and release of energy from the body, and I don’t know quite how that works. So in poetry, there may be something similar happening there where if we just say “fuck it” regarding our own pain and mountain of suffering and just wear a beautiful yellow shirt, then maybe we’re all better off.
LS: What themes are you exploring in your own writing these days?
NS: Mostly how to honor the work of a person who has dedicated themselves to an artistic life. How to honor their work in such a way that doesn’t fabricate or gussy it up as a saleable product. How to be honest with the work of another… In my own personal writing, basically I’m just focusing on rhythm.
LS: What’s one thing you’ve learned from Elizabeth Streb?
NS: My most immediate answer is to take the fall. You know, the joy of the fall. There’s a lot of places we could go with that. Take the fall. It’s not going to hurt half as much as you think. I think Elizabeth Streb does a wonderful job of going against tradition in a way that doesn’t seem knee-jerk or juvenile and instead feels limitlessly useful.
It’s something I can only hope to dream of with the work I do in theater, which is to try to inspire people in a way that makes them take such risks with their own bodies and relationships. I imagine she must be very satisfied with that type of work. It is indirectly political, but very political.
LS: Any last thoughts?
NS: I think cycling is important.
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