by Dana Guthrie Martin
Recently, I summoned Brent Goodman to his computer to grill him via email about his debut collection, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. The book was more than a decade in the making, yet this masterful collection manages to reflect who Brent is now as a poet. His poems are seductive, unsettling, hilarious, brutal and tender. And always, always unexpected. They stab. The breathe. They threaten to ignite in one’s hands.
I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to get inside Brent’s head a bit, to noodle around in that creative brain and glean something about how it works.
Note: This piece is really more of a conversation than a formal interview, as evidence by all the rambling I do throughout.
* * *
Dana Guthrie Martin: You’ve been working on this collection for years, but you’ve commented that you changed it dramatically in 2007 and that most of the poems in the current collection were in fact written in 2007. How did you get to the point of doing such major revisions? I am sure you had a vision for the collection early on, so what led to such a fundamental shift in the architecture of the entire collection and many of the poems contained therein?
Brent Goodman: In late 2007 I realized that my “first book” couldn’t be anything but who I am right now. It was no longer my creative thesis from ’95 or my adventures in Madison thereafter, no matter how long I schlepped those good-looking children around.
Ultimately I gave up trying to get published and stopped writing poetry all together between 2001 and 2006. When I finally started writing again in 2007, I also decided to dust off The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, thinking I was shopping around my belated first book while writing the second. And by shopping around I mean, like, 40-odd submissions to contests/open reading periods in 2007. I made a spreadsheet with every first book call for submissions I could find and sent it to nearly every damn one. The old manuscript had some legs, coming in 3rd or 4th or 15th in a few races.
By fall 2007, I had written enough new work to seriously question why I still wanted to debut a decade-old manuscript. I think the tipping point came when a majority of the new manuscript fell into place. I felt I had nearly finished a second book without publishing the first. But then I looked back at the The Brother Swimming Beneath Me manuscript I was circulating and discovered I could effectively take the three core elegies from the old manuscript and place them in the new one (a “heart transplant,” which I blogged about here).
It was both terrifying and liberating to abandon a decade of writing for fresh work. But I realized this was my first book. So I began withdrawing the old manuscript from any remaining consideration at various publishers and contests, including Black Lawrence Press. An editor at Black Lawrence Press replied that she was interested enough in the old version (it was currently a finalist) to look at the new one mid-contest. Then in February, I received an email offering me a book contract as one of four published finalists for the 2007 St. Lawrence Book Award.
DGM: You have such vision (and such balls!) for withdrawing your manuscript because you felt another was a stronger and more appropriate representation of you and your current work. So many poets, given the pressure to publish and the fear that each book might be their last, would have slogged ahead with those two manuscripts, one in their left hand, the other in their right, hoping to get both published even if it meant each was not quite the “right” single manuscript.
What I am saying is: What the hell possessed you, man? How’d you decide to take the path you took and pull a manuscript from Black Lawrence Press even though it was a finalist? You banked on yourself and your money the way thieves bank on their ability to pull off a heist without any hitches. You are amazing.
So anyway, yeah. What drove you to take that path, and did you get any advice from other poets to do so, or to NOT do so?
BG: Thank you, Dana. I should say I didn’t discover the manuscript was in the short pile for the St. Lawrence Book Award until I tried to withdraw it from the contest — nothing had been formally announced yet — but yeah, I did have to wear boxers that whole week!
The decision was surprisingly easy, no advice needed other than my gut. When the new manuscript suddenly came together I sensed I had more than a collection. I had a book. And I didn’t know what that felt like until it happened. But I did know I had a manuscript floating around out there that I no longer wanted to publish, even if I could. So I started pulling in the nets.
Not to say I would have made the same decision in my 20s, fresh out of grad school with my thesis in one hand and my degree in the other. Thinking it was a race to publish, I would have made choices that race-runners make.
A decade on, I live blissfully outside any pressure to publish. Patience cultivates perspective. And the perspective the writing hiatus afforded me was invaluable. When I came back to poetry and started reading what great work is being published (especially online), my eyesight changed. This forced me to see the old manuscript for what it was — an attachment to who I wanted to be in my 20s — versus the new manuscript, which speaks to who I might be moving forward. Of course, my brother is still at the heart of the book, but in a light now refracted more through joy than grief.
DGM: Precisely. You do have a book, and it reads as a book. So many collections don’t do that. They are poems cobbled together and bound only by, well, their binding. Yours has not only a spine, but a heart, kidneys, bowels, more than 40 different sphincters. (Did you know there are that many sphincters in the human body?) Most importantly, it has bones.
But I realize that I am singing your praises when I should be asking my third question, so to that end: Do you really not feel like your six-year hiatus from writing was time you frittered away? No regrets, for real? (I ask as someone who took a nearly seven-year hiatus from writing poetry, oddly enough one that corresponded with your hiatus. Maybe the planets were misaligned for poetry-writing or something.)
And, here’s another question: What made you come back to poetry when you did in 2006?
BG: 40-Odd Sphincters was actually a working title I was toying with — how’d you guess!? My favorite forgotten sphincter is a toss-up between the sphincter pupillae and the sphincter of Oddi.
Really, I don’t carry any regrets at all for not writing during that period and I hope you don’t either. For me it was a very treacherous few years which I’m grateful to have survived relatively unscathed, but that were absolutely vital to who I’ve become. Never regret transformation.
What brought me back to writing was reconnecting with a poetry community, something I had abandoned when I moved away from Madison in 2001 and hadn’t found since. This started with launching a blog, which put me back in touch with old friends while exposing me to many exciting new writers I hadn’t heard of. The other very important community I found online was your Poetry Thursday site, which got me writing on a weekly basis again. At least two poems from the manuscript, “Doors and Windows for a Room” and “Wisconsin Triptych,” started as Poetry Thursday prompts.
DGM: Oh, your mention of Poetry Thursday helping with your writing gives me goosebumps. See? There, on my arms.
40-Odd Sphincters would be a GREAT book name. If you *do* name a book 40-Odd Sphincters, you have to credit me for inspiring you.
But on to my next question: What poet-bloggers did you find when you started your blog? I am sure people reading this piece would be interested in knowing whose blogs you read, and love, and why.
(And yes, transformation: always a good thing. Our sphincters appreciate it. They get tired of being inside the same old person all the time. It’s good to change things up and keep the sphincters guessing about who we’ll be tomorrow. And the day after that.)
BG: The first po-bloggers I found were fellow Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award winners Ron Mohring (who I had corresponded with in the late ’90s but lost touch with), and Charles Jensen, who wrote me shortly after discovering my blog. I invite everyone to click through my Next Destinations blogroll to find some great writing. I regularly stop by Paul Guest’s blog, where he posts both amazing first drafts and updates on his shooting-star rise to rock-star literary status. I also enjoy Emperor of Ice Cream Cakes for surreal fun, Radish King, Peter Davis (author of Hitler’s Moustache), and Steven Schroeder, just to name a few. And, of course, I’m one of your original secret Internet stalkers.
DGM: If you are one of my original secret internet stalkers, then you know more about me that I might like for you to know. It also means I have the right to snail mail you pictures of my ass, right? (Because if that’s not the case, Step. Away. From. Your. Mailbox.)
So what poets do you read? Who do you love? Why do you love them? (In addition to the poet-bloggers, who we’ve already covered.) Along the same lines, what poets inspired you to write, and why?
And (and this question is very important): If you could poet-stalk one poet, who would it be, and why? (I would poet-stalk Richard Siken, and actually have, twice. I would say that I have poet-stalked you, too, but I don’t think it counts as stalking if the stalkee likes it.)
BG: Well that must have been you then knocking knees with me crouching together in the hedgerow outside Siken’s master bath. Have you checked out his watercolors? They’re amazing. He’d never admit it, but I posed for this one. I’m the guy in front. I was going for a Men in Black meets Annie meets “unapologetic porn stache” sense of place. Seriously, his debut, Crush, is the real deal. We’ll all learn every time we lift it. Find a slim home for it in above your fireplace, I promise you.
DGM: Dude, say no more. I take Crush to bed with me.
BG: I’d have to say my first crush was Ginsberg. A queer Jew with a mother in the insane asylum? I can relate to two outta three, though one I’ll keep a fantasy, TYVM. More important than the fact that he liked taking nude photos of himself, he teaches us to strike contrasting strokes of color against a blank canvas like Cézanne, spark a clash, green against red, hydrogen jukebox reaching our chest before our minds. The mind is jealous and impulsive. We have to dig. A list is always a good starting place.
The Beats led me through Gary Snyder to the sources of Zen. Of course Basho, Issa and Lao Tzu. I think, no matter how contemporary, Web-savy or emo, every writer needs to ultimately discover her source. I think for me that’s also Rumi and Rilke. These are the voices where I cannot find any obscurity. Every word seems to make sense. Who does that for you?
I admit to a big Ted Kooser phase. Let’s say he taught me tennis by the net. He’s important; don’t be a hater — sometimes poetry has to be more accessible than a public toilet.
I’ve taken an oath never to stalk another poet. My last victim was Gerald Stern, upon whom I imposed an ill-prepared kishke trapped in a friend’s rented reception La-Z-Boy after a reading at Purdue. O Lucky Life! / O lucky lucky life. Lucky life was not a quote from that evening.
Most recently, I continue to read Patrick Lawler, who teaches me to have confidence in short sentences with vision over a four-book series.
The rest of my “who am I reading” list is too long to truncate. There’s so much good work going on out there, you just need to find it. Read everything. Discover it.
DGM: Um … Ted Kooser???? Come on, dood. (Psst, I like Billy Collins. *hangs head in shame*)
Hello … Brent? You still there? Hello?
And that concludes the conversation between Brent and me. But we’re not quite done with you yet. There’s still a collaborative poem we wrote, which must be shared, so don’t run off like Brent did.
I Bet You Like Being Told What To Do
by Brent Goodman and Dana Guthrie Martinshe gambles behind your ear, but you
aren’t dissuaded by her words, which fall
in ringlets of desperate femininity
around the stuttering bedposts.
Now you can’t not remember witnessing
through a neighbor couple’s well-lit window
something resembling disheveled frivolity
but too sickly sweet to have been anything
other than unbecoming levity. Should we
let this mingled taste rise or refrain?
This skin is not my own. But yours
is slick as waxed paper. How do we
sense the spark between wonder & witchcraft?
How many fingers must interlace before
we’re able to seal something closed, or open?
