Timothy Liu's books of poems are Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992), Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995) and Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998). He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, forthcoming from Talisman House in August, 2000. His website is at: http://euphrates.wpunj.edu/faculty/liut In this interview [conducted January 2000], Liu talks about the use of poetic variation and patterning in his most recent book, Say Goodnight; the relationship of art to religious practice; the benefits of assembling one's poetry manuscript in a monastery; the poet as both "monk and missionary," and some of his favorite Wallace Steven poem titles.

March 15, 2000
Timothy Liu
by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
© 2000 Gerry Gomez Pearlberg

Gerry Gomez Pearlberg: One thing that's striking about your most recent book, Say Goodnight, is the repetition and echoing of many of the poems' titles. For example, in each of the book's four sections is a short poem entitled, "Say Goodnight." In fact, it's somewhat mathematical in that the second poem in the book is called "Say Goodnight" as is the second-to-last poem - there's a very direct bracketing occurring here. How did you arrive at this?

Timothy Liu: In Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris, she notably reused a few titles, particularly the liturgical "Vespers" and "Matins." This recycling of titles is also used by many visual artists, not to mention composers (in symphonies, sonatas, etudes). For me, reusing a title means trying to get at a particular subject from a different angle. I like the notion of variation. Obsession. "Say Goodnight I" starts off with a drawing of a house left on a table. "Say Goodnight II" looks at a real house from the outside looking in. "Say Goodnight III" takes place within a house, in this case, underneath a grand piano where two men are making love. And finally, in "Say Goodnight IV," we are back inside a house that is furnished with at least an easel and a table, but the lovers have presumably gone upstairs, having more interesting things to do than making art or writing poems. I conclude the book with a poem called "Vespers" as a little wink back.

Pearlberg: There are also a several poems entitled "Last Day" sprinkled throughout the book, and several of your titles begin with the words "Two MenŠ" This interplay between the titles makes your table of contents read like a poem! What does all this say about your use of titles in general?

Liu: I typically title a poem after it has been written. Titles can make or break a poem. Some titles I like so much that I feel tempted to use them more than once, at least until I can think of a better one down the line. And sometimes, I like to just leave pieces untitled. In a seminar on Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Howard once remarked how Bishop's reuse of the title "Poem" in her Complete Poems perhaps documents a certain situation of extremity in which the poet is simply overwhelmed by the poem's subject and has no choice but to either leave the poem untitled or to just call it "Poem" or something like that. That has somehow stuck with me. The poet Linda Gregg has great titles. We once sat out under a tree on a sweltering summer day in Iowa City just reading titles of poems by Wallace Stevens and letting out the most approving sighs . . .

Pearlberg: Give me a few of your favorite Stevens titles.

Liu: "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," "Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is," "Connoisseur of Chaos," "Somnambulisma," "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm."

Pearlberg: Talk a bit more if you would about the process of choosing titles in relation to the enterprise of putting a book together. I'm guessing that the idea of echoing your titles came about within the larger contemplation of shaping and structuring the book as a whole.

Liu: A book has always seemed to me to be one long poem. If the book is divided into sections, then each section should also stand as a movement of a larger symphony. A single poem is of course a symphony unto itself. But once we're at the stage of assembling a manuscript, the poems themselves can be manipulated like stanzas of an extended poem. I was recently asked at a party if I wrote "poems" or "poetry." Well, "poetry" of course. Even Richard Howard in his introduction to my first book, Vox Angelica, remarked that I wrote "poetry rather than poems merely," what he called "a consistent and therefore recoverable gist of experience." Some poets can only work on one poem at a time. My process is to work on dozens over weeks and months, even years. I think this kind of practice makes itself evident in the books that I put together.

Each of my books adheres to this pattern. In fact, I feel that my first three books can quite easily be read as a single work, a 200+ page book in eleven sections under one cover. I have always loved those thick books that Black Sparrow Press publishes, and if I had my druthers, I would just keep adding on installments to the one book that I seem to have been writing in the past decade.

Pearlberg: To what extent, when you write a poem, are you thinking about its place or position in your next collection -that is, in terms of its relationship to your other poems?

Liu: When I'm working on the poems, I'm not thinking about the book. It's only after I've written a substantial body of work that I consider going through the cupboard. When a poem gets published, I usually just put it aside in a folder. Call it "pending." When the folder starts to get real fat, well then it's time to maybe have a look and see if something might be done, if some organizing principle might avail itself to me. Both Say Goodnight and Burnt Offerings were assembled in a Cistercian Monastery outside Dubuque, Iowa. Taking a vow of silence and hearing those monks chant hourly helped lend a necessary clarity.

Pearlberg: How did you manage to get yourself into a monastery, if you don't mind my asking?

Liu: The monastery is open to members of the public who want to take a spiritual retreat in an atmosphere of silence. There are no daily fees for room and board - you simply leave a voluntary contribution depending on your means. I never lasted for more than three days. The Cistercian order is quite severe, nothing ornamental or gothic about it.

Pearlberg: Let's talk about your poem "A Calendar (With Months Torn Off)" - kind of a still-life of a calendar counter-pointing a brief meditation on the movement of time. Tell me a bit about the writing of this poem.

Liu: The last lines of the poem came first, and then the first ones. Robert Creeley says that every lyric poem inherently asks a question, whether or not it is explicitly stated, and this poem seems to ask what will get us out of bed if there's only death and misery waiting for us at the end? Perhaps artistic response. I ended up with Audubon and Mapplethorpe (had tried many others, including Michelangelo), unlikely bedfellows it seems at first, but really birds of the same feather.

Pearlberg: One thing that seems very much a signature quality of your poetry is the combining of classical or "old-fashion" elements (in this case, Audubon's bird portraits) with very contemporary and often specifically gay ones (in this instance, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe). It seems not so much about juxtaposing these elements as creating a sense of continuance or lineage.

Liu: The imagination is always making connections‹this with that. I am a collagist at heart trying to get some sparks, trying to make some magic happen. Sometimes through images and sometimes through sounds, even abstract ideas.

Pearlberg: I enjoy your play on "counting sheep" in this poem, although in this case, there's something a little sinister going on by the end. Tell me about those "wayward flocks" and those "black wolves."

Liu: This poem has an air of apostasy about it, wayward flocks being led down the antinomian path. Leaving the Mormon church in order to come out of the closet has been a central drama in my life. To become a law unto oneself is not without consequences. This poem perhaps praises those sinister wolves lurking at the edges of wilderness.

Pearlberg: Speaking of wildness and out-of-the-way places - you and I first got to know each other a bit at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, and I'm curious as to how the time you spent in that very particular physical/geological/cultural environment might have affected your work.

Liu: In Taos, my goal was to write forty poems to document my "forty days in the wilderness." I took up yoga and swam every afternoon at the Don Fernando Pool. Just across the street was the Taos Public Library where I was able to check out all sorts of books by the ancient Chinese philosophers (i.e. Lao Tzu, Mo Tzu, Hsun Tzu) as well as take home free back issues of Vanity Fair. After throwing the L'ing Chi Ching every morning (an ancient oracle akin to the I-Ching), I would take a morning walk, swim, and then proceed to read and write. Yoga was in the evening. To reward myself from time to time, I would take bike rides into the country and visit with other Wurlitzer Fellows. Also took a few daytrips to Santa Fe, Ojo Caliente, Tres Piedras, Arroyo Hondo, etc. These were the conditions that enabled my TAO(I)S(T) NOTEBOOK to come into being.

Pearlberg: Here's a big question: why do you do it? Poetry, I mean. Why not something else? Why this particular form?

Liu: This is surely one of the central questions. A simple answer would be this: bakers bake bread, poets make poems. We do what we do perhaps in hopes of feeding the multitudes.

Pearlberg: To what extent, if any, do you regard your poems as letters to yourself? The photographer Daido Moriyama describes his photographic images as "private letters that I write and send myself." I'm curious about the equation of art as a kind of "correspondence" with oneself as well as its externalized function as a communication or notation to others.

Liu: If one thinks of art as a religious practice, then one can also think of the polarities of a private devotional and public proselytizing. For me, to be a poet is to be both a monk in his cloister and a missionary on his bicycle on the backroads of Arkansas.

Pearlberg: If there were a Poetry Genome Project just for you, who'd be your immediate or closest predecessors?

Liu: My first mentors were Leslie Norris (a Welsh poet in residence at Brigham Young University), Richard Howard, and the infamous Gordon Lish. Cornerstones all. Then come the muses: Linda Gregg, Louise Gluck and Jean Valentine. True lyric poets all. Then come the great and dusty dead: Milton, Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Crane, Pound, Moore and Bishop. And then the avant-garde: Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer. And let's not forget the likes of Tu Fu, Neruda and Lorca.

Pearlberg: Before we sign-off, I'd like to engage you in a little game. Write a job description for a Poet in 50 words or less.

Liu: Wanted: Lost childhoods in search of word-play for erotic escapades. Must be willing to read all the great dead, develop a reading knowledge of at least half a dozen languages, and pay obeisance to some invisible god full of terror and beauty.