10 Questions for Michael Lavers
- By Abby MacGregor
Tonight, even the frogs
are out there, discoursing to darkness,
regurgitating air, getting it said.
They too are turning the embarrassing
necessities of flesh into a kind of music,
they too are instruments of the invisible,
some unpleased power that would settle
for limp skin just to preserve itself.
—from "All This Fiddle", Fall 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 3)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
From the vast miasmal swamp of early, and less early (and very current) failures, no one piece stands out in my mind as particularly significant or transitional. Just the common and unavoidable process (still on-going) of playing dress-up in other peoples clothes, to usually disastrous results. The earliest stage was probably the Frank O’Hara stage, in which a young, shy, ill-read boy from the Canadian prairies tried to sound like a slightly less-young, extremely well-read, garrulous, and cosmopolitan man from one of the world’s biggest cities, decades ago. There followed, among many others, the Robert Frost stage, the Elizabeth Bishop stage, and the Derek Walcott stage, all leading to the Zbigniew Herbert stage of the present day, with no “Michael Lavers” stage in sight.
Probably the earliest poem I wrote that I could still say I’m not embarrassed by is a poem called “Coda,” a sonnet in rhyming couplets, published in Rattle. I think that poem still appeals to me because it may have been one of the first times I succeeded in just saying what I felt, as simply as I could.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I love how Donald Justice answers this question in one of his interviews. He says something like “All poets from all times and all places.” Of course, I haven’t read them all yet, but I admire the omnivorousness of his answer, and feel probably more impressionable as a writer than is good for me; I seem to want to sound like whomever I’m reading the minute I start reading them. But, in addition to the poets mentioned above, I find myself the most inclined to steal from: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, John Ashbery, Thomas Hardy, Czeslaw Milosz, Mark Strand, and R. S. Thomas.
What other professions have you worked in?
Haha! None. I’m both lucky and weird enough to have known pretty early I wanted to spend my life writing and discussing and teaching poems, and the most compelling evidence of success in this endeavor is my total lack of any other life skills or experience.
What inspired you to write this piece?
“All This Fiddle” takes its title from “Poetry,” that famous Marianne Moore poem, which begins, as we all know, “I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” This is one of my favorite statements about poetry ever, because I think heavy skepticism is crucial for the health of the art form.
While there are few things as important to me as Great Poems, there are few things as pointless as a bad poem, and pretending this isn’t true makes the enjoyment of great poems much harder than it ought to be. Moore helps keep poets and poetry honest: most poems fail. But so what? Enough succeed to keep even the most skeptical reader seduced: “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine.”
“Pensées” started when I came across that metaphor of Pascal’s that begins the poem, “Man is a thinking reed,” which perfectly evokes how, in the presence of nature or art, the body and mind are both stirred into song.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I write a lot about the Canadian prairies, and, in one guise or another, Locust Ln., the quiet, dreamy, perfect sun-filled street on which I live.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Gould’s renditions), which I listen to probably every day. Like the poems I love most, this work in particular is the most perfect blend of mind and heart, of pattern and variation from pattern.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
A small writing group of excellent poets. Sometimes, when I’m confident enough about a poem, which is almost never, I’ll show it to my wife, whose feedback is invaluable but who usually ends up being the last reader, since she’s the person whom I most want to impress.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
Painting. Or playing the piano. Poetry is actually both of those things, visual and musical, and it’s as easy to “get” and enjoy as a painting or a song. But sadly there is a misunderstanding that poems are hard and you need special training just to read them, that they can’t be enjoyed as immediately as music or painting. I’m sure I’m wrong, but I imagine that working in a medium that is stripped of that misunderstanding would be nice.
What are you working on currently?
Polishing a manuscript of poems called After Earth, and drafting another called The Transmutation Notebook. And teaching my son how to read.
What are you reading right now?
Tennyson and John Ashbery, polar-opposite favorites of mine (though not really all that different, actually). I also just finished reading through the weird and amazing tales of H. P. Lovecraft, and am kind of in denial about coming to the end of them. If only I could re-read them all again for the first time. Sigh. . .
MICHAEL LAVER'S poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Arts & Letters, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2016 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize. He teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.
