I first read Gary Young’s work in a class devoted to “hybrid forms.” The class reading list included luminaries such as Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and Matthea Harvey, but our first stop was Gary Young. We studied Young as a master of the prose poem. His thoughtful writing about his chosen form launched our own term-long explorations. Reading Young’s work, I gained an appreciation for a poem’s ability to find, magnify, and re-create the magic of a singular moment. Through Young’s renderings, readers can experience this magic again and again. A moment becomes infinity. 

In addition to poetry, Young brings his razor-sharp perception to visual art, printmaking, translation, and teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Three poems from Young’s forthcoming book, That’s What I Thought, will appear in 45th Parallel’s inaugural print issue, and I took the opportunity of their approaching publication to ask him about his position as the prose poem’s most prominent advocate, learn more about his visual art, and understand the role that religion and spirituality play in his art and life. Our interview took place over email in January of 2016.

Maggie Anderson: Let’s start with the three poems you sent to 45th Parallel. Can you tell me a little bit about them? Where did they come from?

Gary Young: The poems are from a work-on-progress, That’s What I Thought, which includes poems written while I was in Japan working on a book of translations, as well as poems about my life in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There are also reflections on times and places that have left lasting memories.

The three poems in 45th Parallel are all based on my life in the woods, although there is an echo of Japan in two of them. It’s interesting to me that much of my recent work resonates with more than one time and one place. I’ve noticed a sort of web in my recent poems, and interestingly, in my dreams as well, that make connections between situations and habitations separated by decades, and by thousands of miles.

MA: Speaking of location, you’ve lived in your house in the Santa Cruz Mountains for 36 years. I’m curious if you think there’s some sort of deeper level of understanding that you get from a landscape after 36 years that you can’t get after two, five, or even ten? How has your relationship to your place changed over the years?

GY: This is an interesting question, a quandary, really, that has generated a great deal of discussion and the occasional argument between my wife and me over our thirty years of marriage. There is no question that living in the same house, the same town, or in my case, the same woods for very long periods of time allows insights into the place that casual visitors cannot hope to experience. I have lived here long enough to have witnessed fires and devastating storms, even geological changes in the landscape, if modest ones—landslides, and the inexorable slippage of my house and stonework toward the stream. I built all the structures on our property—my studio, my wife’s studio, our house and a guesthouse—and for most of the buildings, used lumber milled on site. My two boys were born and raised here, and as my wife is fond of saying, living here is like living in one of my prints. I am well settled.

Still, I had always assumed that I would move after ten years here, and I had vague plans of moving to a new locale every decade of my life. It seemed long enough to really get to know a place, but not so long that I’d feel stuck. My wife has been unenthusiastic about the idea of moving. The many tons of printing presses, paper cutters and type I possess also puts a damper on the thought of moving. It’s somewhat mute at this point. I’ll probably be buried here.

I must say that I think it’s possible to dive deeply into a place, and to know a place intimately without spending a lifetime there. I have a very special love for and knowledge of Wyoming, which I have visited all my life. And I have fallen deeply in love with several cities—and houses, and bridges, and landscapes. Falling in love, whether with a person or a place, is a special human trait, a sublime gift—uplifting, but dangerous.

MA: You’ve been asked repeatedly to defend the prose poem form. Is there a burden in being known as the preeminent practitioner and defender of the prose poem?

GY: I was very excited when I completed my first book of prose poems, Days. I thought that I had made a real breakthrough in my writing, and I was eager to share the new work with my publisher. When I sent the manuscript to him, I received an unexpected response. He told me that by writing prose poems I had “abandoned poetry.” I received a similar response from several editors who had published my earlier, lineated verse in various journals. I soon found myself in the awkward and unwanted position of apologist and uneasy proselytizer.

Over the years I have published several essays on the prose poem. I co-edited (with Christopher Buckley) a critical anthology, Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, and published a chapter on the prose poem for a college textbook.

I still receive regular invitations to write about the prose poem, which I politely decline. I think I’ve said all I have to say. I’m flattered that my opinion might be of interest, but repeating myself would bore me, and no doubt bore any readers I might have.

MA: Does being repeatedly asked to defend/explain your decision to use the prose poem form change how you relate to it?

GY: My attraction to the form is personal, and not based on any critical attitude, so writing about the prose poem hasn’t had any real baring on my poetic practice.

MA: You’ve said that the prose poem exerts “moral pressure” and encourages “modesty” or “humility.” I love this idea, but I’m not entirely sure I understand what you mean. Is it more modest because it uses the paragraph, a form that people are more familiar with? And why do you think that form exerts a “moral pressure”?

GY: The line is a tool of inflation. That inflation may increase the sonic intensity of a poetic measure, or it might magnify, or exaggerate a line’s meaning or importance. The prose poem sanctions no tap-dancing, no unearned amplification or exaggeration—at least the way I’ve learned to want to write them. All of these traits are manifestations of ego. Modesty is an underrated virtue, especially in writers. We are gifted with words, and we are their stewards. We have a moral duty to them, which is best served with humility.

MA: Your last five books were all untitled prose poems, as are the three that 45th Parallel will publish. Your first two books, however, contained lineated poems. I wonder if you ever feel any tug toward lineated poetry now? And of course this is an impossible question, because who knows what will change between this moment and the next, but I still wonder: Do you think you will ever write lineated poetry again? 

GY: That’s an interesting question, and one that I occasionally ask myself. Although my last
several books have all employed the prose poem form, I am unabashedly obsessed with the line. I have always considered my prose poems to be very long, one-lined poems, and understanding them as such puts enormous pressure on my getting syntax, grammar, punctuation and sonority—all the tools one employs in lieu of the line break—just right. Of course, these are the tools that every poem employs, but their importance is ratcheted up when they’re all you have.

I am still learning things from the prose poem form, and in truth, I have become so comfortable with it I don’t know if I will ever go back to lineated verse. Of course, I utilize line breaks in my translations, and I’m very happy to do so. I may wake one morning and start writing in lines again; stranger things have happened.

MA: Your poems are, to me, often quite spiritual—sometimes explicitly with reference to God, and other times simply through their form. Like an excellent sermon, your poems meditate on a moment and expand it out to something profound. But I think unlike a sermon, they often accomplish this expansion through what a professor of mine called a “leap,” a connection that isn’t fully articulated for the reader. The reader must do the work to make that leap, which deepens and personalizes the profundity. In this way, they are clear—like “windows” as you have said you’d like them to be—but also complex. Not complex like a puzzle, but emotionally complex, I think.

There are so many examples of these “leaps” in your work—but the one most present at the moment is the one that happens in the last two lines of this poem, from Days:

Two girls were struck by lightning at the harbor mouth. An orange flame lifted them up and laid them down again. Their thin suits had been melted away. It’s a miracle they survived. It’s a miracle they were ever born at all.

I wonder how your brain makes these leaps. What’s the revision process like? Do you start with more and then revise to remove anything that is too explicit? Does the profound thought in the final line come first, or does it start with the specific incident?

GY: You may be giving me more credit than I deserve. I think one of the great attractions of poetry is its ability to make the kind of leaps that you describe, to move through time and space without effort, to find and make those subtle connections. I wish that I could consciously make those leaps in my poems, but when they appear, they do so as a consequence of my following as closely as I can the trajectory of the poem, and what it has to declare. Every poem in Days began as a page or more of single-spaced prose. I then removed as much material as I could, while still leaving the essentials intact.

Although it’s certainly never my intention to preach to anyone, I appreciate your comparing my poems to sermons. My grandfather was a Methodist minister, and I’ve always had a soft spot for a good sermon, whatever the faith or denomination.

MA: Your work has the kind of meditative quality I associate with Buddhism, and you have said that your poems are about trying to make sense of your place in the world, which seems a bit Buddhist in its inward focus. I wonder if you could say a few words about how Buddhism has influenced your work?

GY: One of the first books to excite a desire in me to write poetry was The Jade Mountain, Witter Bynner’s translations from the Tang dynasty. Many of the poems in the anthology are by Chinese poets deeply influenced by Chan (Zen) Buddhism, and that led me to a study of Zen, and of Japanese poetry. Days was influenced in equal parts by Whitman’s long lines, and by haibun, a Japanese literary form that combines poetic prose and haiku. Issa’s The Year of My Life (Oraga Haru) was central to my embrace of the prose poem.

My visual art has also been deeply influenced by Japanese art, especially the work of early Japanese woodcut artists that prefigured the lavish ukiyo-e prints of the Edo period and later. The spontaneous, resonant marks produced and admired by Zen artists have long been an objective of mine.

MA: Since you brought up your visual art—I’m interested in how your visual and textual works affect and reflect on one another. For example, you’ve said that you think most poems could be improved by being shorter, and you’ve also said that the “elimination of the inessential” is your primary tool, whatever your medium. What is your process fo creating visual art? How is it similar to or different from your work with words? Do you frequently create visual art inspired by words, or does it arise from other sources as well?

GY: I have no quarrel with complicated imagery, complex designs, or layered, polychromatic art; I’ve employed all of these techniques at various times in my own graphic work. Still, what moves me most is the unadorned line—a mark resting in its radical autonomy. The last book that I illustrated of my own poetry, In the Face of It, was embellished with a series of polychrome, abstract woodcuts. It’s a form that I’ve returned to many times over the years.

But the most beguiling form of mark making for me has always been the simple black line. I recently illustrated Dean Young’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Heights of Macchu Picchu for Stephen F. Austin University Press with a series of line drawings. When you’re confronted with something as dazzling and complicated as a landscape, a pure line has the power to reduce it to a manageable depiction, one that can be apprehended in its entirety.

I draw with pen and ink, and with pencil, but I prefer to draw with charcoal, and then render my drawings as woodcuts. I love the action of my blade against the wood, and monochrome woodcuts produce a line that pleases me more than any other.

I have written poems in response to works of art (a sculpture by Manuel Neri in my new book; a Japanese landscape painting in my last book), but only once have I used my own art as the model for a poem—“The Sketch” from The Dream of a Moral Life. Poetry and mark making come from the same source, and while they may work in tandem, they remain independent. They’re complements, not conjoined twins.

MA: Though you study Buddhism, I get the sense that you are not Buddhist, nor do you see yourself fitting into any particular religious tradition, the Christian tradition you were raised in. Is that true?

GY: Religions require communal activity, a shared set of beliefs, liturgy and practice. Neither my poetic, nor my spiritual practice constitutes a “religion” in any sense of the word, and I can’t imagine that anyone would care to share my beliefs, such as they are. Simone Weil, the great mystic, talks about her being unready for God. I’m not sure that any of us are ready for God, and I’m unconvinced by most believers, whatever their faith.

MA: Do you think of your work and the attention it brings to the specific, distinct moments of life as a sort of alternate religion?

GY: I can’t shake the notion that we live in an incarnated world (perhaps a hangover of having been raised Christian), but just what that incarnation represents I haven’t the foggiest idea. There seems to be a vivifying power in the universe—matter and energy are expressed in seemingly infinite ways—and I revere that. That power could be God, or the Tao, or simply the random expression of being. Whatever it is, I’m happy to praise it.