Chris
Rice Cooper
Scripted Interview with Poet John Gallaher on His Poetry
Collection In A Landscape
“The Unadorned
Nonfiction In Verse”
001
The date
you first started writing In A Landscape
and the date In A Landscape was
completed?
August 25th, 2009 – January 6th,
2010. I’m guessing. But it was something like that.
002
Can you
describe in great detail the step by step process of writing In A Landscape from the moment the idea
was first conceived in your brain until final book form?
But in a larger context, I’ve written the way I have for
years from out of the idea that, as Robert Lowell (right, at the Harvard Bookshop in the 1960s. CCbySA3.0) says, “I wanted to make
something imagined, not recalled.” And
to recall, to place memory and my experience to the front like this, that made
me very uncomfortable. All my life I’ve
had problems with authority, both as someone living under authority, and being
seen in any way as an authority figure.
I am suspicious of closed, or final, authoritative meaning, as well as
the authoritative voice. But at some
point I want (or I need) to say things, to name what I believe. This book is part of that struggle.
003
Can you
describe the publishing process of In A Landscape?
Excerpt
from In A Landscape given copyright privilege
by John Gallaher
I
“Are
you happy?” That’s a good place to
start, or maybe,
“Do
you think you’re happy?” with its more negative
tone. Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling.
That’s part
of
the problem too, but not all of the problem.
Flowers out the window
or
on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.
We
spend a long time interested in which way the car would
best
go in the driveway. Is that the
beginning of an answer?
Some
way to say who we are?
Well,
it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations
of
structure, which is the way we need for it to be. Invent some muses
and
invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus
to
get us going. And what was it Michael
said yesterday? That
the
committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these
other
things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation,
so
then we have this difficulty. It just
gets to you sometimes. We have
a
table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you
about
apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made
several
distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors.
How
can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game,
How,
for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness
by
saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too.
On
the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo. Outside,
a
garbage truck passes right to left. They
intersect. And so the world continues
around
two corners. The table gets turned over,
with several people
standing
around seemingly not sure of what comes next.
Look at them
politely
as you can, they’re beginners too. And
they say the right question
is
far more difficult to get to than the right answer. It sounds good,
anyway,
in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something
you
can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way
as
well. Looking back at the alternatives,
we never had children
or
we had more children. And what were
their names? As the living room parts
into
halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant,
a
filing cabinet or two . . . because some of these questions
you
have with others, and some you have only with yourself.
