The Lightning Room with Nick Narbutas

 

 

Nick Narbutas talks about using syntax to cope with myth and history in his poem “Tiresias Abandons His Pretense,” from the July issue.

 

Interview by Diana Clarke

 

1. I was so excited, in “Tiresias Abandons His Pretense” to encounter, well, Tiresias. It’s hard to address old mythologies in new ways, and fantastic when someone—like you—does it well. What drew you to the old blind prophet of Thebes in the first place?

Thank you so much! What initially interested me about Tiresias was the trade-off he was forced to make—Hera taking his sight, and Zeus making it up to him by giving him foresight. The ability to see what lies beyond and the inability to see what’s right in front of you. With that in mind, I started using Tiresias as a kind of lens in order to write about events with more historical weight than I felt I as a person/poet had any right to be the speaker for. But the only time it ended up happening that way was a four-part prose poem called “Tiresias Watches TV” about watching 9/11 on the news as a child. Every other poem seemed to glance off the historical and into something vaguely cultural, if not just personal. Then the issue arose that I had to deal with allof the Tiresias myth, and I couldn’t figure out how to answer the question: how do I, in my narrow experience as a male, take on the mask of a figure who knew the experiences of being male and female? Then: do I really have the right to try? The project got more and more convoluted as the poems drifted further away from my original idea and I wound up trying to work through issues of my own privilege rather than issues of, say, the rise of the Golden Dawn party, as I had initially intended. This poem is me admitting that I am not up to the task of speaking through the mask I’ve chosen, I don’t have foresight, I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, the project failed. It did fail. I’ve kept most of the poems that came out of it, but the larger project has been canned.

2. 42nd Street might seem yet more weary and mythological than Tiresias in contemporary writing. What do you think the Greek prophet would notice in Times Square that’s old news to the rest of us?
The first thing would be the crowds. When I first saw Times Square I was blown away by the same two things I think blow away every newcomer: the glittering spectacle of it all, and the fact that there were other people on the street after 10 p.m. I was as impressed by the crowds as I was by the lights. It was wonderful to be surrounded by so much activity, though after interning at an office around there and having to go through the crowd every day, the wonder wore off and it became a nuisance. But maybe Tiresias would still love the swarm of people. Or be horrified. It wouldn’t just be a nuisance though.

And once he acclimated, he’d probably take a closer look at all those big bright lights and realize that every single one of them was selling him something. He’d probably wonder how all those businesses got the right to put such huge advertisements in a public space. He’d look at the Coca Cola ad and wonder what good was it to put your logo up without even saying what it is you sell. That kind of brand recognition, where all you need to do is remind the public that you exist, would probably be unthinkable to someone from his time.

3. I loved the poem’s long sense of time—”till a volcano shoulders/through a pothole,” “like an acorn waits to grow up and topple something.” Maybe this is a bit of a reach, but I’m wondering what a West Coaster like you thinks of living in a place like New York with a comparably longer history as part of the U.S., or how a place’s history affects your present experience of it.

When I was growing up in California I felt like I had been born at the end of the world, or at least the end of America, definitely of American exploration, and so for my own exploration there was nowhere to go but backwards to the starting point. When I applied to college, the furthest west I even considered going to was in Chicago, which is where I wound up until I came to New York for grad school. I needed to make a personal history of my country.

What I didn’t realize is that, in a place with the [density of] history New York has, it’s not really possible to make a personal one. New York is what it is. I feel like I have no control over my experience of it, and I don’t get to decide what the city means to me, because every inch of its meaning has already been mapped out. It kind of feels like New York, as a city, was completed before I ever got there. I had dreamt of living in Manhattan for as long as I can remember, but now I live in Brooklyn. I love Brooklyn, but it’s not the New York I went out looking for; that New York already happened and is gone now. It’s been converted into a cute brunch place.

4. In a poem so concerned with history, I appreciated that you used the term antivenin, which to my ear is a bit old-fashioned. How do we choose what of the past to carry with us? Do we choose?
I guess it didn’t occur to me as being old-fashioned. The word just sort of toppled out of the box and snapped into place. I think I’m drawn to it because it’s one of those words that you might mishear as a child and replace it with something way more logical (antivenom) than the actual word. When you realize your mistake, the word gets sort of enshrined inside you.

Maybe that’s part of choosing the past we carry with us—we pick up on the things we first got wrong. Nothing sticks in your awareness so much as your own mistakes. But other than that, I don’t know, on my off days I guess I feel like we pick the most convenient past, the one that nicely supports the present we want to be the present.
5. I knew exactly what you meant when I read “I donkey”—I move slowly but deliberately, I keep on. And I thought that was especially apt for the idea of abandoning pretense. Can you say a little about what you meant by that?

When I wrote that, I had Gertrude Stein’s perfect definition of a dog floating around in my head: “A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to / say that means to say that more sighs last goes. / Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.” I was picturing something imbalanced about the movement, or ungraceful. There’s something inherently ungraceful in abandoning your pretense, because it admits to having one in the first place.

6. To place you in history a bit: where and when did you write this poem?

I wrote the poem in February of this year, at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on 111^th and Amsterdam, just across the street from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I was drinking a coffee and eating a croissant, which they make with some sort of sugary glazing. I’ve never actually eaten a Hungarian pastry there… I was seated at the table closest to the window, facing inwards toward the back of the shop, on a heated bench. I brought the first draft in to workshop that week and they told me to cut the first few lines, which I did, and it was good advice.

 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.