ALAN MICHAEL PARKER
The Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, Alan Michael Parker is a cartoonist, novelist, poet, and professor.
Alan Michael Parker has written four novels: Cry Uncle, Whale Man, The Committee on Town Happiness, and Christmas in July. He is also the author of nine collections of poems: Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days (with painter Herb Jackson), Long Division, The Ladder and The Age of Discovery (Tupelo Books, October, 2020). He served as coeditor of The Manifesto Project, Editor of The Imaginary Poets, and coeditor of three other volumes.
AMP’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines, and twice in The Best American Poetry annual; his prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. New cartoons and flash fictions of his may be found in Fiction Kitchen (Berlin), LITRO, New Flash Fiction Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
In this interview, Alan Michael discusses the scope of his work and the details of his new collection, The Age of Discovery.
Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris
In addition to poetry, you’re also a prose writer, having written novels, short stories, and flash fiction. Do you find you inhabit different parts of your creative self or mind when you’re writing in different media?
I subscribe to C.D. Wright’s idea of One Big Self — well, at least that’s the title of her book, but I like the idea as a paradigm. So I don’t really think of my mind as subdivided, or my creativity as different depending upon the medium. Of late, I’ve been moving into other media and uncharted creative waters for me, and even still, it seems to be the same rowing.
But it’s true that the focus changes. What I’ve learned is that I’m writing books more than individual works, and doing so keeps me in “novel-brain” for the duration of a project, for example, or if I’m writing poems for a long period, then I just poem along.
In the opening poem, the speaker acknowledges the reader directly. This being your ninth book, how do you see your voice changing over the years? And your audience?
I’ll address the second question first. I used to write for my mom. She was a college professor, a serious reader, a crossword puzzle fanatic, and she loved poetry (which she wrote in her teens, as many word-made teens do). Sooner than later, I realized that she liked too much of my stuff — or I imagined that she did — and so I needed to invent a more critical audience. That’s been useful over the years.
As I age, so does my imagined audience. And of course, I hope that some of the conversations I’m having in my head with dead famous writers are real conversations, and they are actually answering my questions, rather than simply humoring me.
My voice has changed for sure. As a younger writer, I thought style was more important than voice. Now I understand a bit better how interconnected those concerns are. To me, voice ain’t nothing if you ain’t got that swing: even in the colloquial and the demotic, I always aim to sing.
The diegesis of “Poem” is striking, and very effective. How do you go about pacing a poem, both in terms of meter and information divulged? Which would you say took the lead in the first draft, and how did the poem change in later drafts?
Thanks! “Poem” was a hard poem to write. Although I have written many “list poems,” and it’s a form that matters to me, they have tended to be more recursive, with intermittent information recurring to form a narrative (that is, you’d get the plot in #3, 6, 7, and 19, for example). They also tended to be funnier, but “Poem” couldn’t be outright funny, given its subject matter. Poignant, maybe...
But in “Poem,” too, I wanted the off-stage narrative to be the story, in a way; the poem implies, and intimates, and the reader infers, and the reader fills in the lines between the lines. That required less writing than I tend to favor in narrative; the poem, as a result was mostly over-written and then cut down. I would say that I probably had 75% more language and ten more items on the list in earlier drafts. I would also say that I was very conscious in the writing of “Poem” of the beats — not in a metrical way, but more like an actor thinking of pauses.
In terms of meter, I believe in sound as a form of desire, and that’s what I’m looking to create in the reader. If you get three sounds cross-cut with two other sounds...that creates expectations. That’s what I’m listening for, and hoping to act upon compositionally.
The Age of Discovery, Tupelo Press, 2020
In the poem “Ornithology,” you’ve written the lines, “despite so much of each day / happening to me.” Could you tell me more about the speaker’s agency in these poems, especially as it relates to faith and technology — two important characters in the book?
Well, heck. Wouldn’t we all like to be in charge of ourselves, at least a little?
In the poem “The Stars,” God, who is a woman, goes out onto the porch to read (I must know — what is God reading?). This is the first time She is invoked by name in the poems. Why personify God, and why gender Her?
She’s gendered female, in this one poem, because masculinity can be such a pathology — and yes, that idea stands outside the poem, as an aspect of my politics, but it also seems to me important. The gendering was definitely a Why Not.
What’s God reading? Don’t you think she’s reading all of the books? I imagine that she’s the most well-read God.
In class, [ed. note: Alan Michael was Isabelle’s thesis advisor] you once claimed you mistrust ekphrasis (indeed, one of these poems is even called “Against Ekphrasis”). So why write so many ekphrastic poems?
Really? There’s a poem about looking at a painting and how that feels, and a poem about going to a museum to validate our assumptions of beauty as an ethical idea, and well...I guess the poem about Miles Davis and the rain is an ekphrastic poem...okay, that one. But ekphrasis remains anathema in my house: I live with a painter who says, “Look, either make the painting or write the poem.” Her argument, as I understand it, is that words can’t do colors, and vice versa.
For me, the entire collection could be summed up in the lines, “what if the things / we dream of care?” from “Things and Feelings.” Could you please elaborate on the poetics of care and how you arrived there?
Nice phrase — “the poetics of care.” Can I keep that?
I have long believed that the attentiveness required of the poet and the reader together make the poem a shared intimacy. I also believe this statement to be a function of what’s well-seen in the world: what we’re shown, what we cherish, what moves us, what moves someone else, and what we do in our lives to respond to beauty. As a poet, I tend to be more ecstatic – ec/stasis, etymologically, my bag, as it means to be outside of one’s self, and in the world nonetheless.
In The Age of Discovery, especially, I think that care was my outraged response to the hatreds in the news, and how I have coped with the idiocy and fury expressed by the dying and deluded American patriarchy. But I also think I learn by caring, and poems connect self and other, at least for me.
The Age of Discovery is available now
Learn more about Alan Michael’s work on his site
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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.
