By Yongbo Ma

Yongbo Ma: Your poetry collection The Selfsame Planet (Mayapple Press, 1999) was described by its editor as celebrating literature that is both challenging and accessible, and transcends mainstream and avant-garde categories. How do you define “mainstream” and “avant-garde”? Who are the mainstream figures in contemporary American poetry, and who are the avant-garde ones? Where do you position yourself?

Zack Rogow: The categories of “mainstream” and “avant-garde” are, for me, too rigid to describe the variety of poetry written in recent decades in North America. I suppose one could say that the avant-garde embraces the literary collage forms that Cubist poets like Apollinaire and Reverdy created in the years before World War I. But then how are those innovations “avant-garde,” if they were made over a century ago?

The mainstream of poetry in North America has traditionally been defined as more narrative, less fragmentary. I don’t really see it that way, myself. How does a poet like Tess Gallagher fit into that description of the mainstream, for example? She breaks many rules of traditional narrative.

On this subject, I think back to a famous incident that happened during the general strike that took place in France in 1968. The Cannes Film Festival was closed down in support of the strike, and a teach-in took place where radical young cinéastes of the avant-garde confronted some of the more traditional filmmakers of the previous generation. In frustration, Jean Renoir, one of the senior directors, said to his more junior colleagues, “But you at least must concede that every film should have a beginning, middle, and end?” To which the young Jean-Luc Godard replied, “Yes, but not necessarily in that order.” I side with Renoir and with Godard in that debate.

Ma: Throughout your long writing career, which poets and writers have influenced you the most? Who are your favorite poets, particularly American poets? Please provide a list.

Rogow: A list of all the poets whose work I’ve liked would fill many pages. A majority of the poets I enjoy reading are not from North America. I think North American poetry is too insular. Too few writers in the United States seriously read poets from other traditions.

As mentioned earlier, I have been very influenced by poets of the New York School, particularly Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. O’Hara described many of his writings as “I do this, I do that” poems. I’m drawn to poems sparked by actual incidents.

It was the second generation of New York School poets, particularly Bill Zavatsky and Robert Hershon, that affected my work very directly. Those two poets combine elements of stand-up comedy with a deep immersion in literary traditions.

I’m also very taken with the love poems of the Surrealists, including Neruda’s writings, and Breton’s The Air of the Water. I find June Jordan’s writing incredibly powerful, including the way Jordan performed her poems, as if they were theater (Jordan was also a playwright and opera librettist).

I mostly write free verse, but I also enjoy (and write) rhymed poetry. I’m very interested in the forms that come out of South Asia, such as the ghazal and the rubai. I’m also a fan of the five-line tanka form from Japan, which I prefer over haiku, because the tanka is traditionally more narrative.

Ma: How do you interpret Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams’s advocacy for a distinctly “American” style of writing; and how do you reflect this in your own writing practice?

Rogow: I definitely see myself as a New World writer. Although I feel deep connections with world literature, I see American literature as being different. When I say “American,” I mean Latin American and South American as well.

For me, the New World is a place of openness to democratic ideals, to the beauty of the body and the physical world, and to a vibrant mix of popular and high culture. I see this coming from Whitman’s poetry, particularly “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” but it’s in all his work.

William Carlos Williams is for me very much an American writer in his advocacy of “No ideas but in things.” North American culture is definitely WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get). For the most part, the United States is not a society of mystics wasting away in dark cells. We are a culture that values tastes, smells, and tangible things, maybe to our detriment at times.

Ma: In contemporary poetry, there seems to be a tendency towards objectification resembling Eliot’s depersonalization, Rilke’s object poems, Pound’s mask poems, and the objectivism of Williams and Zukofsky. What is your view on this issue, and how do your poems handle the tension between personal experience and universality?

Rogow: The tension between personal experience and universality is an issue I’ve been wrestling with as I get older. When I look at my life’s work as a poet, and the work of many of the poets I admire, they are in a sense extended autobiographies written in one-and-a-half-page installments. That’s a poetic tradition with wonderful roots, going back at least Sappho’s and Catullus’s love poems in ancient Greece and Rome; to the Japanese tanka of the eighth century of the common era; and in English, to Wordsworth’s The Prelude. It’s incredibly illuminating and powerful when writers speak honestly and well about their own lived experience. But is autobiography really all that poetry is capable of in our time?

In North America, I think identity politics has also tended to crowd us into our own silos, not daring to try to speak for anyone different from ourselves. There’s a lot to be said about the dangers of appropriating the experience of others. But I also worry about poetry becoming so specific and personal that it no longer even attempts to reach a wider readership.

Many of my previous poems start from an episode or incident that took place in my own life or in the life of a friend or family member. I began those poems by trying faithfully to record actual events, under the assumption that a true and authentic account of a personal nature would touch something universal in the reader or audience.

In my most recent poems, I’m taking an opposite approach. I’m starting from experiences that are not specific to my life, experiences that are fairly common. To make those generalized events moving and meaningful to the reader/audience, I’m grounding those common moments in specifics drawn from real life, and in sharply focused imagery. I don’t know if I would call that objectification, since I’m not writing about things, as much as I’m touching on universal experiences.

Ma: You’re an accomplished French literary translator that’s translated André Breton’s Surrealist poetry. Do your poems contain Surrealist elements; and how has translation influenced your poetry?

Rogow: When I first began writing poems regularly in my early 20s, I was very strongly influenced by Surrealism. I often wrote prose poems using the technique of automatic writing that Breton developed with the other poets in the Surrealist movement. I wasn’t great at spontaneous creation, though. I always had to edit my free associations. I do think the Surrealists were correct that the unconscious is the greatest artist. Our dreams show that. We improvise at a much higher and more electric level of creativity than our self-conscious mind can reach.

There are other influences on my poetry in addition to Surrealism, though, some of them more naturalistic and narrative. I hope I’ve been able to learn from all the literary schools that I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to.

Translation is a continual influence on my writing. When I hear a poem in another language, my first instinct is to want to know how it sounds in English. For the languages I’ve studied, I can do that mostly on my own. For languages I don’t know, I work with a native speaker who is fluent in English, but not necessarily a poet.

World literature is a constant inspiration to me, and the best way to get to know a writer’s work is to translate it. Translation is almost like peering over the author’s shoulder as they are writing. It’s an intimate and exciting process.