Interview with Iain Haley Pollock
By Michael Quattrone
Michael Quattrone of The Westchester Review spoke with Iain Haley Pollock on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 6, 2024. This is an edited excerpt of their conversation.
MQ Iain, thank you for sharing these poems with The Westchester Review for our all-poetry issue, and for making time during this busy week of the AWP conference to talk about them.
“Subject of My Desire (In Which You Do Not Figure)” is, according to its epigraph, an ekphrastic poem. How did you first encounter the source drawing, “Homenaje” (meaning “Tribute”) by Julio Le Parc, and how does working in collaboration with an existing artwork change or inspire your creative process?
IHP I’m a museumgoer, so writing ekphrastically is part of my artistic practice. I think having that engagement with another medium is helpful. I’m also visual—if you did a catalog of my imagery, the images would be mostly visual. I move through poems cinematically, from shot to shot. There’s a natural progression from that interest to writing ekphrastically. But I always want to bring the [source] work into the real world. Ishmael Reed, in Mumbo Jumbo, calls art museums “centers of art detention,” and that really sticks with me. I am interested in this traffic between what is in the museum and bringing it out.
I encountered this specific artwork at the Met, in the Breuer building. When the Met was in that building, they hosted a Julio Le Parc 1959 exhibit, and I saw [“Homenaje”] there. I found the painting to be really funny, to be honest, in an ironic way. It’s a tribute or homage, but it’s completely geometrical. It’s a grid, so there’s no sense of the person to whom it is a tribute, or to whom it is an homage.
My first official date with my wife was to the Whitney, when it was in the Breuer building, so anytime I’m there, I have her in mind. So when encountering this tribute, in which there was no trace of humanity, I had Naomi in the back of my mind—and I realized that she appears in my first two books. And I stand by her being in those books, but sometimes wonder: Is this an act of objectification? And if I’m honest, the ultimate answer to that is yes. When we include people in our poems, there is an objectification that happens to them, and in that objectification, there is some form of death. They lose their humanity.
Seeing this Le Parc piece in this place that has sentimental value for Naomi and me made me want to write her a poem in which she doesn’t actually appear, to kind of rectify the sins of my past. And so I wrote images from our life together, without actually putting her in.
The painting is a black-and-white grid, so I tried to pull in these black-and-white images that also correspond to our lives, to create a tribute that is not a tribute, or a tribute that recognizes our relationship, but tries to avoid that sort of objectification that I think is inevitable, but that I was feeling guilty about as I viewed the Le Parc piece.
MQ The two parts from “Of Marks & Lacks” suggest they are sections of a longer poem or sequence. Can you tell us about the whole? Do you approach working in an expanded form differently? Can you share a little about the shape of the poem, or how you chose the strategy of implied redaction?
IHP I sent you the first and the last parts, which are two of my favorite sections. The first poem is something that happened in February of 2020, and the second poem happened in either January or February of 2021, so the sequence is basically a year.
Working with a sequence is different. I do have, in my second book, a long, sequential poem in sixteen sections, which is a mythopoetic collective biography of American jazz musicians. That poem was sort of written consciously and cohesively, all in the same moment. The sequencing of “Of Marks & Lacks” was the result of a failure—an inability to make some poems about the experience of COVID and the lockdown period actually work. I usually default to narrative poems—or maybe lyric narrative—but they weren’t working in that way. And I realized that some of the issue was that I work so much off memory that I couldn’t get my memory to be as sharp and as detailed as I usually like it to be when I’m writing, because of the time warp of COVID, and the worry and anxiety of that period.
I think in some strange way, when I sit down to write many of my poems, I say: This is the time I’m going to write a Sapphic fragment. And then, thirty to fifty lines later, I no longer have a Sapphic fragment. And I just happened to see the Anne Carson translation of Sappho on the shelf, and I thought, that’s it, this is my chance. There are holes here. There are gaps here. What happens if these become fragmented? What does that look like? And it was an interesting exercise to pull language out of [my] poems.
Probably from being a middle-school and high-school teacher, I can be very strict in my view of grammar and syntax. It was really eye-opening to me to see language re-combinate and create its own syntaxes. I think that discovering this off-kilter syntax was much of the pleasure of writing these poems.
I’ve read the poem aloud once to a very trusted audience, just to see how it would play. But reading a poem is a real pleasure because, again, this new syntax gets created. Once you start pulling language out, phrases that shouldn’t make sense have a felt sense to them, and some surprising leaps and juxtapositions happen that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t elided that language. There was a narrative failure that allowed me to make a formal leap.
MQ That fragmenting, or creating of space, also lets you visually shape the page.
IHP That’s absolutely right. When we were both at Hudson Valley Writers Center over the weekend, Edgar Kunz was lamenting not having a more physical and embodied practice. I wholeheartedly feel that. I envy painters their paint-splattered painter’s pants, you know? And so it was a chance for me, the museumgoer, to be more visual that way.
Reading aloud continues to be incredibly important to my practice. There is a visual element to it, but I try not to let that trump the sonic element of it. If things sounded awkward to me, they came out.
It was fun to have parameters in which I was working. Moving the brackets around and deciding what to cut and what not to cut, and how that played on the page, was some of the pleasure of writing the poem, and I hope of reading the poem as well.
MQ I found that to be the case. It is interesting to me that you had some inner sense of compositional rules, and I’m guessing that it might have been liberating in a way.
IHP Yeah, it was. One element that, especially toward the end of my writing process, really bedevils me is line breaks. I was less worried about line breaks than I would be in a normal poem, because so many internal breaks exist in the poem. So the actual line break, I didn’t put as much emphasis on it.
I set the margin at four inches and let that, in the initial writing of it, dictate where lines lay on the page, and I tried not to mess with it. To keep up the visual art metaphor, I created a block of granite by setting the margin at four inches, and then kind of chiseled away at it from there. It was a different way to approach things. And again, I didn’t feel that I had to put the same emphasis on the line break, because the caesurae and holes—the lacunae—helped create internal breaks.
MQ Could we read this as a redacted prose poem?
IHP I wouldn’t have said that. Most redactions are of other people’s work. The history of blackout poems is blacking out other people’s work. I wouldn’t say I was redacting my own work. I was admitting to the flaws in my own memory and retelling of that period. And redaction seemed to be the way to get at that.
The trouble with redaction is that it can be the function of official secrecy, right? It can be a tool of power to maintain that power, which is not what I was trying to do. I was working off these Sapphic fragments, where the papyrus has disintegrated and been lost to us, and I felt something similar in my own memory of things: having it disintegrate and not being able to reconstitute it. But yeah, as with redacted and blackout poetry, what is left is powerful and hints at the greater whole.
For me, there are two poles in poetry. There is a power in saying a thing directly, and I believe in that. There’s a vein of my poems that are very political. And I think that in those poems it can be helpful to step to stage front and say what needs to be said, say what you mean. But at the other pole, I see a power in leaving things unsaid, in talking around something, so that the thing that is talked around amplifies, both emotionally and perhaps metaphorically. I think these poems work by that indirection, and are much more about what is unsaid.
Michael Quattrone (he/him) is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006) and the songs of One River (Wolfe Island Records, 2018). His work is included in The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013). His poems will appear in forthcoming issues of the Bennington Review, Salamander, and the New York Quarterly. Michael lives in Tarrytown, New York, where he reads poetry for The Westchester Review and serves on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center.