W.T. Pfefferle
Psychosis, Golf Courses & Poetry
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Dear Prof. Pfefferle, looking for poetry in a life story means what… For me it’s always been about a focus on the most modest moments. The celebrations and desperations are easy to write about, the grand tragedy, the remarkable comeback, whatever the trope. I’ve always been fascinated by the time in between those. I like the stillness and the quiet, where the emotions are not keening. |
Photo: courtesy of the artist |
And every one of us has our own poetry, but we needn’t call it that or treat it like that. It again goes to what I said earlier about authenticity. Our own poetic self is our truest self. The poetry of one’s life is that bit where we are the most at ease, the most fully ourselves. That's someone I want to know and something I want to read.
How did you come up with My Coolest Shirt?
A few years ago I began to recognize that I’d been writing about these three characters, an unnamed male speaker, an ex-wife named Clare and a girlfriend named Netta.
They existed in their own worlds. There was no overlap at all. Clare was always an ex-wife; their marriage was always in the past. And Netta was someone the speaker knew in a different time. To be fair, Netta existed in a variety of forms, as a young woman, and then someone closer to middle age. And because I become fixated on names, the characters from these many disconnected poems began to appear along a single timeline in my head.
My previous collection was written specifically as a novel in verse, and once I realized the personal relationships of these three characters, it, too, took on a continuous narrative. But as the poems come from a long period of time (one was written 30 years before the book came out), I never tried to sequence them in a regular way. For me, the speaker always had had his problems, created by him, witnessed and ministered by these two women. I don’t think it matters when these little tragedies take place along the speaker’s journey. He’s either young and clueless and futile, or older, clueless, and accepting.
And I loved that the Netta poems especially had a humor to them. She’s the character in the series of “My Bad Girlfriend” poems. The juxtaposition of her nuttiness and Clare’s steadfastness was interesting to me as they both were women the speaker loved. He didn’t understand them, couldn’t make them happy, but their differences added to his sense of befuddlement.
The shirt itself was a metaphor I liked because the actual line, “This is my coolest shirt” was something I scribbled one day in a fit of discomfort and annoyance and humidity. I was assuring myself that the damn shirt breathed well, that despite the hot room I was in, and the grilling I was undergoing, that this shirt was the best thing I had for the conditions. Now, of course the shirt on the cover truly is mine, and truly is cool. I bring it out on occasion.
and finding and losing,/and the lost. We’re always switching positions between the three roles you’ve defined here but it’s essential to remember that ...
Well, as in all states of our human experience, these are transitory.
I think the book really comes down to the main three characters floating through this tragicomedy. It’s no coincidence that the only understanding any of the characters get is in their adult years, because these kinds of lesson are either inflated beyond reason or completely lost on the young.
When the inevitable ups and downs occur in life, it’s easy to go all in with one’s chips. This is the end. This is the point from which we never recover. But it’s all cycles. Knowing this makes all of it easier to take, and I think the speaker, at the end of that book, and in that moment, in its last poem, knows that while this thing is over, that he is not.
How did you come up with My Coolest Shirt?
A few years ago I began to recognize that I’d been writing about these three characters, an unnamed male speaker, an ex-wife named Clare and a girlfriend named Netta.
They existed in their own worlds. There was no overlap at all. Clare was always an ex-wife; their marriage was always in the past. And Netta was someone the speaker knew in a different time. To be fair, Netta existed in a variety of forms, as a young woman, and then someone closer to middle age. And because I become fixated on names, the characters from these many disconnected poems began to appear along a single timeline in my head.
My previous collection was written specifically as a novel in verse, and once I realized the personal relationships of these three characters, it, too, took on a continuous narrative. But as the poems come from a long period of time (one was written 30 years before the book came out), I never tried to sequence them in a regular way. For me, the speaker always had had his problems, created by him, witnessed and ministered by these two women. I don’t think it matters when these little tragedies take place along the speaker’s journey. He’s either young and clueless and futile, or older, clueless, and accepting.
And I loved that the Netta poems especially had a humor to them. She’s the character in the series of “My Bad Girlfriend” poems. The juxtaposition of her nuttiness and Clare’s steadfastness was interesting to me as they both were women the speaker loved. He didn’t understand them, couldn’t make them happy, but their differences added to his sense of befuddlement.
The shirt itself was a metaphor I liked because the actual line, “This is my coolest shirt” was something I scribbled one day in a fit of discomfort and annoyance and humidity. I was assuring myself that the damn shirt breathed well, that despite the hot room I was in, and the grilling I was undergoing, that this shirt was the best thing I had for the conditions. Now, of course the shirt on the cover truly is mine, and truly is cool. I bring it out on occasion.
and finding and losing,/and the lost. We’re always switching positions between the three roles you’ve defined here but it’s essential to remember that ...
Well, as in all states of our human experience, these are transitory.
I think the book really comes down to the main three characters floating through this tragicomedy. It’s no coincidence that the only understanding any of the characters get is in their adult years, because these kinds of lesson are either inflated beyond reason or completely lost on the young.
When the inevitable ups and downs occur in life, it’s easy to go all in with one’s chips. This is the end. This is the point from which we never recover. But it’s all cycles. Knowing this makes all of it easier to take, and I think the speaker, at the end of that book, and in that moment, in its last poem, knows that while this thing is over, that he is not.
How would you define the role of poetry in the art world and in the real world?
Oh dear, poetry. What are we to do with it?
I came to it by accident, after studying and writing fiction for years. There was something about the concision of it, the blankness of even the heaviest narrative, which still opened up for readers in a hundred different ways depending on where they were coming from.
The problem in the real world is that what most people think of poetry is really “bad poetry,” stuff that is artificially saccharine, artificially obtuse, or artificially elevated. Tell me something’s poetic, and I’m sure to change the channel.
Within the established world of writing, poetry gets enough love, I think. There’s no commerce in it, but you can’t walk through a coffee shop without seeing a flyer for a poetry reading, and online and trade mags continue to feature thousands of new poems and poets every year.
I think poetry does something different from fiction. For me it’s always been about leaving air in the narrative, setting a scene with as few strokes as possible, enough to lead a reader roughly where I intend, but not so much as to disallow interpretations that answer that reader’s own needs.
What’s the importance of poetry in enhancing, documenting, and showcasing love stories and all fragments of emotions?
It’s no more or less important than anything we consider art. We draw pictures on caves or blast away on Telecasters (my preferred art, really), write short stories and novels, cover weighty canvases with oil, and, yes, we scribble poems in notebooks or tap them on a tablet.
Love is so amazingly hard to nail down that we need any and all of these in order to get close to it.
I think of my own poems about love (I mean, what else would anyone write about?) to be little stories into a dark room. When one opens the door a flash of light illuminates just enough to get one’s bearings. But the door must close and the fumbling begins. Is this an end table? Is this where the ring was left? Is this a note? God dammit, what does the note say? Did I write it or did someone else?
Who are some of the poets, classic or contemporary, whose poetry you read over and over again?
I cannot get enough of Terrance Hayes, Beth Ann Fennelly, Paisley Rekdal, and Natasha Trethewey, all poets included in one of my earlier books about the role of place in poetry. I always find myself drawn to work that is unlike my own, and I think all of them qualify. I also am a big fan of Bob Hicok. David St. John is a favorite, but I always feel so unworthy after reading his work. It’s so fine, so immaculate that it feels like I’m doing a different job altogether.
When I’m in a writing period, I never read any other writers. It’s too much.
As for earlier poets, I still go back to Allen Ginsberg, whose work is simply breathtaking and ambitious beyond any measure. But it’s probably Eliot and Keats who I return to the most, actually seek out to read again and again. I read “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” aloud sometimes, just for myself. The pacing! And Keats, well, the sadness just pours off of those poems.
Probably the verse I hear or listen to the most comes from songwriters, John Hiatt, Lucinda Williams, for example. Rickie Lee Jones. Dylan all day, all night. Springsteen. The songwriter whose work I know best, though, the one whose body of work is the most consistently sublime, is Warren Zevon. I could never be so funny or biting, but a guy can dream.
What is the most unlikely place to encounter poetry?
The golf course. Of course, everything in life comes to me on the golf course.
My greatest pleasures and rages take place within minutes of each other. Actually, sports have always been a huge part of my life. Loving these “games” has always allowed me to see past the effort and the results and the skill, to little moments of pure magic, when complete emptiness and silence surround something simple like catching a ball or, in my case, hitting the sweet spot of a 9 iron that feels as though I’m merely swinging that damn club through air.
Sometimes the greatest poetry is a gesture, a dance move in a silly music video, something physical, authentic, when there is zero self-awareness and complete immersion in just the pleasure and the doing of a single act, cut off from the meaning of it, the goal of it.
I dropped my favorite glass from a shelf one afternoon, and in that split second I thought of what it’d meant to me, its heft, its feel of perfection in my hand. I knew that it was gone, that it was broken already, a zillion pieces, even as it fell. Vainly I flipped a free hand at it, more likely to knock it against a wall than anything else, and somehow it just landed against my open palm, causing my fingers to curl. It wasn’t more than a half a second. But it was exhilarating. It had been saved, not by me, but through me. It was instinctual.
When I’m at my best on the golf course – and this is so rare that I really shouldn’t even be allowed to talk about it – is when there’s no thought, no strategy. I’m not breathing in; I’m not breathing out. I’m just letting the club swing and, man, I’m barely on the earth at that point. The same thing happens when writing a poem, when the lines just appear on the screen, a character saying things that surprise me, even while they sound like the only thing that could be said at the time, in that world.
If I can just get out of my own way, out of my thoughts, everything would be poetry.
What are the top five rules to write poetry that is universal and excites?
Well, I’m not interested in writing poetry that is universal, and do my best to stay away from any poet who is. It’s the most incredibly idiosyncratic and personal thing I do. My move away from fiction came, I think, because I was trying to write fiction “that was universal” and that “excited.” For me, that was the wrong road on a bad map.
When I wrote poems I was just trying to clear stuff out of my head and my heart, tiny narratives, always about characters, people I dreamed up or people I amalgamed from pals and acquaintances. I put them into dramas and let them have their scenes, and left air in the work because I simply didn’t know what these characters truly wanted in their worlds anyway – I never did in mine.
I do my best to stay away from rules when it comes anything I love. If rules govern it, I try to avoid it.
What is the life of a poet, what is essential to it and what else has an impact on it, for better or worse?
Any artist faces the electric bill and the cost of groceries. I don’t know any artists who do what they do to pay the bills. I write because I feel as if I must let loose of these voices in my head, these characters and stories. They truly populate my waking hours as real people, as real as the folks I know in my regular life. I don’t know if it’s psychosis or what, but the only way they give me peace is if I write their stories. And sometimes the stories are fully formed and reasonable, and I see the point, but other times, like a lot of My Coolest Shirt, for example, I just let these flawed characters spin on the page. I could fix them, you know. I could solve the speaker’s troubles, and I could steer Netta away from him, and send him back to his ex-wife. But I don’t, and I can’t tell you how little that bothers me.
Any artist needs some time and space, that’s a necessity. Whether you do it in a car with a notepad on your lap like Raymond Carver did, or in a tiny toolshed like John Gardner, you simply have to find the time. I go in and out of belief on the idea of a writing community. When I recently did some readings for my new book I found such pleasure in meeting other writers I didn’t know, and reconnecting with some I’d known more than 30 years ago. That blush of community was great, but once I got home and back into my routine, I just felt more at peace again. I am likely missing a great deal of help and camaraderie, but isolating myself, even from loved ones, is part of what works for me. I have all kinds of folks willing and eager to read my work in draft form, people I know would offer insight and help, but honestly I don’t seek it out. I’m not worried about dilution or sharing credit; I just think of the work as my own.
So I guess an artist needs understanding! Leave him be, the pouty brat. He’s “writing.”
I used to think some modicum of success was important as well, publication, whatever. I mean, I’m not even a blip in the poetic landscape. My name and work have never amounted to anything. I see others succeed, often love their work, admire their success, but I do not have one idea of how they’ve achieved those things. I’m not sure what I would do if somebody offered me the key to larger success. I’m not sure I’m young enough or ambitious enough to strive as I might have once.
The voices in my head don’t want a bigger audience. They are just stumbling around looking for love, the next one, the one they let get away. Their concerns are mine. I’m really just writing now so that they’ll occasionally leave me alone so I can get back to the golf course.