Moving a Plane Around a Living Room: In Conversation with Zachary Schomburg
Interview W/ ZACHARY SCHOMBURG
Zachary Schomburg is an artist, poet, novelist, teacher, and publisher of the independent poetry press, Octopus Books. He lives in Portland, OR.
I call Zachary Schomburg from my mostly cemented yard in New Orleans and he goes for a walk. It’s February. For a year, he’s stayed in a ten block radius in his neighborhood in Portland. He goes for walks often. I do too. He gets excited about going to the grocery store. I do too. His book, Fjords vol. 2, comes out from Black Ocean in May. So we talk about it, collaging, collaging with language, collaging with emotions to make tension in a poem. We talk about slowing down. At one point, Zachary says of a poem from Fjords vol. 2, “it’s the feeling that’s dark, but it's the treatment that’s light.” And I hear a few cars drive past Zachary. And I pace in my yard, tossing small, fallen twigs with my toes. And I watch two birds leave a hole they’ve made a nest from in the back of my house.
Isaac George Laurtisen: So I've seen you post a lot more paintings recently, and I'm curious to know how painting and poetry work together for you, in terms of your process, and where those differences are too.
Zachary Schomburg: They don't really have anything to do with each other in my head, but I do them for the same reasons. I think I get just as obsessed about each of them. Painting for me started to take over writing. I finished Fjords vol. 2 and then I started on a new novel because that's just sort of an old habit. I'm a writer, so I write things and I try to write a novel about a boy who is deathly afraid of accidentally killing things, and who steals a swan, and I get obsessed for little moments at a time, usually for about two weeks. I write 5,000 to 10,000 words and get excited about it. But then I take a long shower and I start painting in my mind, you know, and it goes back and forth a little bit. Overwhelmingly over the last year, though, I just can't stop thinking about painting. I think about painting the same way that I think about poetry when it's time for poetry — I spend all the little moments that I have with myself, like before I fall asleep or those few minutes after I wake up or taking a shower or going on a walk. I'm either writing a poem or painting something or reading a poem or looking at a painting and immediately thinking about what I can do. I paint because I really want to see a painting that I really like. When I get into it, I get to just come alive. I get to be a part of something I really love but I get to be a part of making it. I get to see it happen from scratch. You don’t get that luxury with paintings by your favorite artists (can you imagine?!). Poem-writing and painting can be so similar because I don't know where I'm going with them. Usually, I'll have a reference. For a painting, I'll have something that inspired it, like some little edge of a stain on a Frankenthaler, but there's always a moment when I'm either writing or painting that’s so exciting when I go, “oh my god! I think I know what this is going to look like.” Something just gets unlocked and I know where it’s going to go and I just get so excited that I end up skipping a meal.
IGL: It's interesting to hear how both processes are about discovery, right? So it’s about figuring it out once you sit down to do it.
ZS: Yeah, it's about discovery for sure. I want to see what I make and then I want to see a thing that I love that I'm making, but especially this year — maybe it's just about getting older too, it's just about slowing down a little bit and meditating, getting lost in something, allowing my obsession to take over and being off of my computer and my phone. I'm not thinking about anything else on the internet. So, those are the moments where I feel really calm in a space where I can lose time. I don't get that too often, so I really look forward to it because inevitably, especially with painting, it does take time.
Painting and poetry are both time-based arts. You know, we look at the final product all the time. We say, “look that's a painting” but it’s a painting, it ends in “ing,” you know? The final product is the last moment when you’re looking at it but it takes at least a couple hours just to put some color on the canvas, so that really slows you down and makes you think and allows your mind to meander. I love that feeling when this happens with a poem too. As a kid, I'd start a book in the afternoon and wouldn’t notice that the sun went down. I love that feeling of being so wrapped up in a thought, then readjusting to the world I live in. That happens with paintings now where I'll start around 3 or 4 and then I’ll come to and it'll be like 8 p.m. and I should probably make dinner or something, you know, and it's such a good feeling, like a true awareness of being alive, like coming out of a coma, as far as I know, and then recognizing how hungry you are, and there’s so much to eat.
IGL: In a similar way, I think, there have been times when I've been able to draft a poem from the first to the last line and I feel like I'm in a state of not being fully conscious of what’s happening in front of me.
ZS: Like lucid dreaming. You’re watching your brain think. When you write, do you write the first line and then you write towards the last line?
IGL: Yeah, I try to write pretty quickly. At least for the first draft, I want to pick up these associations that are just popping into my head. Most of the time that’s just the first draft and it’s usually a little jumbled and there’s some nonsense going on. I try to just sprint and then go back through in revision to figure out what's at the heart of the thing.
ZS: I feel like I used to do that. I used to try to tell more of a clear narrative story and that story usually would start with me figuring out the first line. I remember James Tate talking about this, saying he'd spent a long time thinking about that first line and once he got that first line, the rest of the poem took a fraction of the time to write. He was just thinking about where to start and say, “where am I going to start? What's the character? What's the problem?” for the narrative. If the story is central to the success of the poem, it’s natural to think about what happens first.
Recently, I was invited to write a poem in this journal called Midst and I wrote about four or five poems in this program that records every keystroke and then you can play it back. As you play it back, you watch the poem happen like a replay — slowing it down, speeding it up — and in watching it I learned so much about how I write. What I learned is that, at least for these Fjords poems, I don't write them in narratives. They just kind of popcorn all over the place with ideas and images and then I puzzle piece them together like they’re collages. The poems feel like cohesive narratives just because you have to read from the first line, but I certainly don't think of them in order. I just pull from different things and different ideas and that makes them push up against each other so that little surprises happen and little weirdnesses happen. In that way, it feels like collage rather than storytelling.
IGL: Yeah, I actually wrote that on the cover! “Collage” in big letters.
ZS: Oh, cool!
IGL: I know you’ve talked a little bit about how the poems in Fjords are inspired by dreams and sometimes by other people's dreams. Through collaging, are you trying to capture a “dream-logic?” I guess, whatever that means.
ZS: Similar to Fjords vol. 1, in vol. 2, I asked about five or six people to send me a recent dream and from there I would work with it, you know, like as if that's the clay and then I just kind of play around with it — add stuff to it, take some away, make it stranger. I’d, like, change the dad into a horse. There's one called “Afraid Cloud'' which I like and that's my friend Kyle's dream, except he's trying to take care of a horse for his dad but the horse dies and so he gets bloody and tries to hide the horse's body and not tell his dad about it. His dream was just a nightmare where it was another human who died and he cut up the body. And it was a super interesting dream, but it just felt too much like recognizable violence. There's something about cutting up another person's body that doesn't belong in Fjords where the violence is more like children's book violence, or German folk tale violence. You know, it's a little absurd having to hide a horse in your house. Not ridiculous, but a filter of offness. You wouldn’t laugh if it was some teenager's body that you're cutting up, so it's just a matter of taking his nightmare and turning it into something that feels like it could fit in that book. It’s the feeling that’s dark, but it's the treatment that’s light, but with a weird light.
Compared to Fjord vol. 1, it is more experimenting with sentences and what sentences can do. They do feel a little less like straightforward stories to me, but then there are a few others like “Inflatable Barbecue Cart.” Or the one where there is a long line of people trying to go to the bathroom. That one’s from one of my dreams. I suppose they could fit into Fjords vol. 1. Oh, and the one where everybody thinks the guy is the stud of the year. Yeah, nevermind, I think probably quite a few of these could’ve been in Fjords. vol. 1.
IGL: Since this is a continuous project, when you go into writing the next volume, do you know its experiment?
ZS: When I wrote Fjords vol. 1, I didn’t know I was going to do volume two. I just thought it was funny to call something Vol. 1, when there were no other volumes. The title worked like a good minimalist poem—an allusion to what’s missing. But I just really like writing these kinds of poems and wanted to do more of them. They’re the most natural poem for me to write — I can sit down and write one in a half hour like pure entertainment. It wasn't like I was learning anything new. It was just something I found I could do well and I wanted to see if I could continue to surprise myself and make myself laugh. So, I wrote the first few, I think “This is the Life,” which is like the third or fourth poem in there. And it was one of the first I wrote, and I thought this fits in Fjords. It wasn't until I kept writing them that they started to change because I think my relationship to those kinds of poems were starting to change. And I realized this is Fjords, and this is just how I do them now. You know, I'm not 33, I'm 43. And this is how this slightly older version of myself who's read and written more poems would now write a Fjords poem. It occurred to me that Fjords vol. 2 is like a marker, just like Fjords vol. 1 was, of where I am in the process of writing poems in my life. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. And if my form is Fjords then I can start to see how my relationship to this form, and poetry in general, changes. And also, how does my relationship to the subject matter change? How do my dreams change? How, now, am I going to die and love? I'm going to be able to mark how that changes too. So, then I got just really excited about letting myself not try to mimic what I was doing before, but just to write this version of Fjords now that I'm in my forties and then knowing that now I really want to write Fjords vol. 3 when I'm in my 50s and allow myself to do it differently. But the one thing that'll stay the same is the form. That’s the one rule I’ve set so that I have a control group for this experiment, essentially.
IGL: So this could be an every decade project.
ZS: Yeah, so I’m just thinking vol. 3 will happen when I'm in my 50s, vol. 4 will be in my 60s. And then I'm thinking vol. 5 will be the last one. I'll probably die when I'm 74, if I had to put money on it. I'm going to try to get five out before then. And then I’m hoping someone will publish a big fat book just called Fjords. I hope Dennis Schmickle is still around to do the cover for it. I think he will be. He eats pretty healthy and takes care of himself.
IGL: Speaking of death, that's kind of this book’s biggest theme, right? The poems that lead both volumes are titled, “What Would Kill Me.”
ZS: That’s another rule too. To start with that title.
IGL: I love the idea of starting a book with the awareness of death, usually an idea of “the end,” yet we propel into these poems that are very thematically different. And many of the tones of the poems are drastically different, too.
ZS: I think that I just wanted Fjords vol. 2 to feel more intentional as a follow-up to vol. 1 and that you can see a sequence. So, I guess if one of the rules was going to be writing in the same form then I thought that that could be another rule to start with “What Would Kill Me.” I wanted to think again, “alright, now what do I think would kill me?” I'm not actually sure what the answer is in that particular poem in vol. 2, but it does come from a real moment in my life where I was watching Woman in the Dunes and paused it to go get another beer. That’s all true. It was a hot summer night. You know, I feel creative when I'm happy and maybe it's like I'm happy when I'm creative. I don't know which spurs the other but I think that's probably generally true. I just remember being kind of happy in that moment, so when I saw that screen pause, I was like “that's the cover of vol. 2” – those three on the sand dune holding flashlights looking for the main character. It wasn't until later when I thought about how to use that to solve the problem of what would kill me and just start from there.
Maybe I don't know what would kill me right now, but I know I had this moment where I was watching this movie and three people were trying to kill another person and I just let myself spin away, and maybe that's the answer of what would kill me now that I just spin away and go to the Moon and find a pair of scissors there. Many of the other poems are less autobiographical, but they do feel honest. I just wrote them at a different time.
This book, unlike Scary, No Scary, doesn’t feel so thematic, so purposeful. One might feel more dreamlike than others, but I’d never think of writing a poem about death. Instead, they just collect and the form probably holds them together more than anything. So that's why I wanted one to be funny and one dark and one makes no sense and then it's done.
IGL: I was picking up on a lot of that – how one poem can be about death, but then there's a joke in there somewhere. Or a poem about grief suddenly has a really beautiful expression of love. We were talking about collaging with images but it also feels like you’re doing emotional collaging.
ZS: Maybe that’s another way to answer that first question about how poems overlap with painting in the same way as trying to find tension with colors and shapes and composition. I try to do that in a poem too where I'm just creating tension and creating things that surprise. By putting one thing next to another you can make something spark. When you're collaging and you cut out a plane and put it in a living room and then you just move it around until it looks good here. I don't know why, but it creates tension. The same way tension becomes visible when you put a joke next to it. If I make something really dark and then I lighten it with some absurdity, that might now be funny, and it might now also be really sad, or it'll make me feel complicated feelings because of the proximity of these things. Or the joke itself might be funny in another context, but here it's really sad because I put this plane in this living room. The scale is off. But the living room is taking itself seriously, and the plane too is taking itself seriously. And we’re all taking the individual parts seriously. But the scale! So yeah, it is just about needing two things to touch each other in a way that you don't know how to feel about it exactly. And that feels like a real risk, and to be clear, by “risk,” I mean a risk that's way safer than all other risks on this planet – the risk of writing a poem. I'm able to do dangerous things with words in it. And to be clear, I don't mean “dangerous” as in offensive. I mean like I put two unlike things together because the goal isn't to make sense. The goal is to make a feeling. And if I put those two things together, there's the risk. A lot of times it doesn't feel good or it's dumb and I'll take it out. But I'll write it in and just see how that feels. Moving a plane around.
IGL: So when you're writing, what does this risk look like on the page?
ZS: I think the best way to answer that question is if you go to Midst. That answers that question exactly. I’m trying out lines and taking them away, testing what sparks a feeling, or a confusion, or a tension, or an awkwardness. I qualify this risk-taking as the risk of writing a poem because there is no risk. There are no consequences. There’s always a way back to where you just were. In that way, the risk of putting something in the poem that doesn’t belong, or deleting the best part, is no risk at all. Yet, so few poets take it. Too many poets are afraid to delete. Oh, man, there’s nothing more satisfying than deletion. Sometimes, I think I write only so that I can delete. Why do children stack blocks? If a poem bores me or I think it's almost falling flat, it's probably because the poet fell in love with it too soon.
IGL: Yeah, I’m guilty of that, for sure.
ZS: So, I'll look at my keystrokes playback and I'll be like, “my god, that's a really great line and I deleted it, what am I doing?” And then you figure out that without it the poem works. That line would have just sank it. In the moment, I just don't think about it too hard and I delete it. In the white space, I can still see it for just a second. But then I forget about it. It’s there, but it’s nothing.
IGL: Yeah, that can be a tough part of writing, to me. Getting the ego out of the way. If ever I really like a line but it’s not working for the poem, hopefully I can realize the process is becoming about me. It's not about the poem anymore.
ZS: And here's the thing – that stuff you deleted is still there because it's all part of what made the poem. It's in there. No one’s ever going to read it, but you had to write that really good stuff and delete it because that's what made the poem spark. But if you were to keep it in there, it would have dragged it down. But that stuff is still in there. I think a really good poet is really good at deleting words, you know? They're not really good at writing. They're really good at deleting.
IGL: It’s also about picking up what's underneath the language, right? Seeing what’s rhythmically working or seeing if the poem just needs some room.
ZS: Right, it’s like a plant can live if you give it space. You know, sometimes I feel really bad about trimming the roses, like, I’m just killing ten roses. But if I don't, the whole thing's going to get weighed down by the old roses. There’s a poem in Fjords vol. 1 that I really love. The line goes, “This is how you love: you try over and over again to throw a red balloon across the river from a tree.” And that's the last line. It's like a two or three sentence poem but that poem used to be a whole page long — it would’ve been the longest poem in that book — but that line was still the third line and then there was a bunch of stuff about love and I don't know whatever else but I just chopped it off because I was taking a risk with deleting all that stuff I loved. And my heart broke. I lost all these words but then suddenly it had the space to mean something. But at that moment when something felt risky, I was like, “oh shit, I just deleted the whole poem!” But all that stuff I deleted — I have to trust the reader feels it there, in the blank space.
IGL: So, with most of your books, you include an index. And it seems like a small thing but I always look forward to them because they’re pretty funny! It’s like, if you want a poem about birds you can flip to the index and find all the poems that mention birds. It feels so scientific, but in a funny way. So, where did the indexing come from?
ZS: It's just a ton of fun. It started out as an exercise I gave myself on The Man Suit when it was done just to see how many times words showed up. I remember Janaka, the publisher of Black Ocean, who said that I have a lot of poems about crying and I had no idea, so I started indexing it and he was right – crying showed up like 20 times and I didn't want that. It was helpful to see other patterns too. I had a jaguar in one of the poems and like three gorillas, but then once I knew that, I made the jaguar a gorilla to make it feel all intentional. So it's just a really helpful exercise. It made the book better, tighter, more thoughtful. I was encouraged to do that again with Scary, No Scary because people liked it and they wanted to talk about the index. And I love doing it. Once a manuscript is done, composing the index has become a way for me to celebrate it. It’s sort of a matching game and if something shows up a couple of times it feels index worthy. All my books have one except for Pulver Maar because that book was less of a singular book, but just more of an old-school anthology of poems that I wrote over five years or so. Like a collection of little separate books. But yeah, I had the opportunity to do it again with Fjords vol. 2, and usually the poems start to change a little bit because like I said before you can match the poems up. There's no reason to have a horse, a bear, and a monkey. Just make it three horses.
And because you don't write all those problems all at one time, usually over a three-year time, it’s hard to see them all at once until you index. When indexing, I realize that three years ago I put the word “iceberg,” or “hot dog,” or “politeness” in a poem, and then I did it again years later. I can say okay, I guess that's the thing that I do and maybe I'll do it a third time, or maybe I decide I don't want to do it at all. But yeah, I'm not even aware sometimes that I'll put these words in over and over, and people will tell me that I use the word cloud, or cliff, or boats or horse or whatever. And I do, but when I'm writing, it’s not like I mean to develop a theme, you know? Like, if you're writing a children's book, there are those words you reuse, but for me it's not intentional. Those are just the words that are right there on the top of the pile. They just show up more often than the words at the bottom of the pile.
Then with the index, you can really see: there’s the proof, there's the data. I think that's the other joy of an index — it’s so the opposite of a poem. Like, there’s no reason to index a book of poems! Ha! It's just absurd. Indices are for, like, mining data or making a navigational tool. Like, nobody would read a book and say, “I only like poems with birds in it, so these five about the birds, I’ll read.”
IGL: I love the idea of someone not having read any of your work before and going to the index first and saying, “what am I going to learn about apes today?” And they’ll go to the page and get something totally not what they were expecting.
ZS: I guess it does offer up a way of navigating through the book that doesn't have to be just opening it up at random or starting with the first one. If you like spiders, you can just read the three poems with spiders in them today, and maybe people do that. But it’s just another way of getting from poem to poem because otherwise, these poems aren't necessarily in any order. Other than maybe the first two and the last one of Fjords vol. 2, you can really just move the poems around and it’s still the same book. So, it doesn’t really matter what order you read them. You might as well use the index. I suggest starting with poems with strawberries in them, then the poems with mice, frogs or bats in them, then the ones with fields.
Isaac George Lauritsen is a poet and illustrator. His work can be found, or is forthcoming, in Bennington Review, Full Stop, Hobart Pulp, Jabberwock Review, Lost Pilots Lit, Muzzle Magazine, The Shore, Sidereal Review, Soundings East, Tilted House Review, Your Impossible Voice, on a broadside from Octopus Books, and elsewhere. He served as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine. He lives in New Orleans.