NU: How did you start writing as a professional nonfiction
writer? As a poet? In what publications has your nonfiction writing
appeared?
ML: I got my MFA in poetry and focused on the ordinary
struggles of a young poet to get by--moving all over the country to
take temporary teaching jobs, and so on. In 1994-5 I spent a year
at Princeton on a writing fellowship. I was quite bored and isolated
there. One night, on a lark, I went to a performance by a juggler
named Michael Moschen. I sat by myself in an audience comprised
mostly of small children and their parents. I was transfixed by
the performance. It seemed to me that the juggler was exploring,
in highly articulate--though silent--manner, many of the issues that
concerned me in poetry: the relationship to matter (in the juggler's
case, abstract forms like spheres, triangles, rods); the intricacies
of pattern; the problems and possibilities of symbolic action.
The juggler's work struck me as an allegory of imaginative process.
A week later, I was describing the juggler to an acquaintance, and through
a series of lucky chances found myself offered an assignment to write
about him for The New Yorker. I had no sense of what I was doing.
I certainly didn't think of it as "reporting." But it
worked out--not without many missteps--and before long I had the opportunity
to write on a lot of topics that were unfamiliar to me. It seemed
like a great way to exercise my curiosity. Mostly I did profiles
of odd people--people who, like the juggler, were artists working in
media unrecognized as "artistic." I also began to write
about places in
which various kinds of disaster had struck, or were about to strike.
I wrote about toxic contamination and dam-building and flooding and
other calamities. These subjects, too, seemed to resonate with
my interests in poetry. I wrote the standard-issue pieces for
The New Yorker and, later, The New York Times Magazine; the more adventurous
pieces--aesthetically and physically--were written mostly for places
like Outside and Men's Journal. I've continued writing and teaching
poetry all along. Poetry is my over-riding priority.
NU: When writing nonfiction or poetry, the writer approaches
history and the account of that history in different voices, techniques,
and traditions. In the tradition of nonfiction, the form of the
writing is guided by a linear account of events and tends to be "objective"
in its description of events. In poetry, the form allows a different
agency and, from his agency, a certain subjective account of events
is given truth-value. You write both nonfiction and poetry, how do you
approach the differences of these forms/genres in their accounts of
historical events and what does each form/genre do that the other can’t?
ML: The best response I can give to this question
is strictly personal. For me, writing--whether poetry or prose--is
how one gets to grapple with the "given": with the data
that each of us confronts as the stuff of history, memory, reportage,
or everyday experience. In order to arrive at something that feels
like the"truth" of the matter, I think we often need to strip
an experience of interpretations and ideas--what we believe we "understand"
about it--and try to encounter it as if for the first time. That's hard
to do-especially under deadline; and especially in commercial magazines
where there's not much tolerance for the kind of unmediated ambiguity
that poets tend to recognize as the attribute of "truth."
In poetry and prose, the forms and expectations and readerships are
different but the means are essentially similar. We try to find
the right words. We try to be precise and accurate and clear.
We try not to betray the complexity of our subject. Poetry often tries
to make claims for the reality of states of consciousness--of sensation,
of inwardness--that don't get a lot of respect in the commerce of the
everyday. But at its best, nonfiction prose treads the same ground:
it argues, implicitly, for the inextricability of what we experience
and what we feel. And, on the other hand, the strongest poetry
gives us an unrivalled account of our reality. I'm probably someone
who believes that, in the end, a people are known to us most vividly
by the imaginative artifacts they leave behind. Which is to say,
I'm a believer in the information value of art--of poetry, painting,
architecture, etc.--and one who hopes that information can, itself,
aspire towards a poetics.
NU: What do you think of current historical events
(the war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq, and the coming election)?
What is the responsibility of a writer in these times?
ML: My personal views on the large events of the day
are quite unexceptional. I find these times to be dismal.
I don't like what we've learned about ourselves in the past few years.
I think a writer has the same responsibility as anyone else: to
be alert; to resist complicity and inertia; to strive toward precision
of feeling and action, even if that 'action' is in writing; to be 'courageous'
on one's own terms. I admire activists but I'm not one.
NU: As an accomplished nonfiction writer and poet,
what would you recommend to up-and-coming writers of both forms/genres?
ML: The hardest thing, I think, is to develop the
skills and confidence that allow one to be oneself in writing.
Writers are often insecure people with a deep need for approval.
But I often find--in myself and others--that when one's work is constructed
so as to seek approval, the force and individuality of the writing is
often undermined. So in addition to technique, one needs a certain
amount of fearlessness.
NU: And in conclusion,what nonfiction books are you
currently reading and would recommend? What nonfiction books are essential
books for you?
ML: I admire John McPhee a great deal. I love
Elias Canetti's "Crowds and Power," Rachel Carson's "The
Sea Around Us," and James Galvin's "The Meadow."
I'm very interested in certain hybrid texts--books that include nonfiction
without being nonfiction: above all, the work of W.G. Sebald and
Georges Perec. In a similar vein, I'm interested in the way writers
like Don Delillo, Richard Powers, Kenzaburo Oe, and JM Coetzee incorporate
essay, history, and memoir within novelistic form.
Interview conducted via email by
J. Michael Martinez
For more information on Mark Levine and his writing, click
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