Paquin’s world
A poet writes about art, love, and universal randomness
By Elizabeth Licata
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Photo by Jim Bush.
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Here’s an e-mail interview with Paquin, about his poetry and his thoughts on poetry in general.
Your writing is very intense and evocative, sometimes almost painfully so. Where does that come from?
There is a certain beauty and dignity in pain, and in expressing the pain one feels. This is why we remember Munch’s The Scream or Wyeth’s Christina’s World. No matter how happy we are or we pretend to be, we know the helplessness and loss in paintings like that. We look at mountains and sunsets and oceans and see the picturesque, but in order to fully understand our nature, we also have to see the decay and the threat and the punishment inherent in these things. The death of nature, the lies we’re told by our so-called leaders, the spineless slop we’re sold as art and entertainment, the slipping away of our children and parents and grandparents—these are things we all endure daily, and to smile through and ignore them is to lie to oneself. I won’t lie to my readers just to provide the kind of easy, comfortable poetry they might want; I’m not unique in this regard.
How long have you been writing poetry? Why did you start?
My mother wrote poems in high school and she had an old edition of Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind on the bookshelf. I was taken by his playfulness, how his lines would meander about the page, how he’d use whatever words he felt like using. I memorised his poem “Dog” to perform in junior high school. Here was the germination—probably no different than a lot of writers. I give credit to my entire family for bringing me up in an environment that celebrated, and engrossed me in, the arts.
What about love and relationships in your poetry? There is almost always a “her” or a “you” who is being addressed. One gets the sense that, often, someone is being specifically addressed, passionately and forcefully.
Any figures in my work, especially the “women,” must be some composites—dream lovers, the lovers who never were. Sometimes I’m addressing my wife, but then it’s never fully her … there is some not-fully-realized muse who’s always on my mind. I think this is a highly Romantic and not very unique thing to feel. To go back to Wyeth, one might also see how he was lovingly married for many, many years, but at the same time painted his secret muse naked out in the woods. My muse isn’t actual like his, but it’s the same thing when I sit down and write—someone vague is speaking to me and I need to entertain it, to speak back.
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It’s similar to the muse—I don’t necessarily believe in [a] god, but I always obsess on the concept. I’m often railing against this figure, even while I doubt its existence. Sometimes I give genuine thanks to this figure, even though I believe full well the mountain range exists because of universal randomness and not from some sacred plan. I do, however, think that nature suffices perfectly for god—it’s both awesome and malevolent, willing to provide tiny graces like buttercups springing up along a brook’s bank and a minute later willing to crush your child under boulders or kill your war-veteran grandfather with Alzheimer’s. My favorite filmmaker, Herzog, is unsteady with his use of the word “god” as well. It’s people like this I trust the most—I admire questioners and seekers, not fundamentalists and dogmatists.
How has your life in Buffalo—which we know is so different than New Hampshire—affected your poetry?
I get to ruminate on themes that in the past few years have become central to my life and my writing, nature and family, from afar. I think that lends my writing an authenticity, a dreaminess I might not attain if I had the hard facts—the White Mountains, pine trees, Hampton Beach, my parents’ faces—in front of me to study like still lives. Also, living in Buffalo has also afforded me the opportunity to belong to a cohesive community of artists, the likes of which doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else—certainly not where I’m from. My writing, as a result, is much more multidisciplinary in approach and in terms of subject matter, and my thinking has become more progressive.
When did you start Slope? How is it going?
I conceived of Slope in 1998, while still an undergrad at Plymouth State College, surrounded by the slopes of the White Mountains. There’s the influence of landscape again. In 2001, my friend Chris Janke and I launched Slope Publishing Inc., which includes the journal as well as the small press Slope Editions. Today we are doing well—as a non-profit organization committed to bringing to the world literature by overlooked communities of writers. We recently published The Other Side of Landscape: An Anthology of Contemporary Nordic Poetry; we’ve continued to publish first and second books by American poets; we’ve been donors to the arts in the communities in which our volunteer staffs live and work (western Massachusetts and Buffalo); and we have international poetry features forthcoming in the magazine.
In the new book, My Thieves, we see formats that are very different than in The Violence. Some are very dense blocks of language, as in “Hampton,” and some take the form of columns/lists. What brought you to this type of writing after the spareness of poems like, well, “Sparism”? I should add that the structure of the earlier poems is equally interesting —complex and variegated.
I want to use the page, and place text on the page, in as many ways as possible. I challenged myself to write long poems for the new book, to break from the minimalist concerns and approaches of the earlier books. I was interested in seeing how long a line the page could bear, how long a line I could write without a drop-off in its energy. Dignifying silence through the use of space between words and lines is something the Objectivists, Creeley, etc., did and something I still admire; in this new book, I wanted to see if I could generate non-stop energy and boundless music. I suppose a motivator was my belief that long poems seem to be ignored these days, and I wanted to see if I had narrative patience. I suppose this evolution between minimalism and long poems is no different than any we see all throughout the history of the arts—we’ve got to test ourselves to see what we can make and how well we can make it.
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My Thieves has many references to visual art. Who are your favorite painters and what are their roles in the book?
I have loved painting longer than I’ve loved poetry. I was painting watercolors—taking classes and winning prizes—when I was six or seven. As I mentioned earlier, my family promoted the visual arts big-time since I was very young. Art books were everywhere, in our house and in my aunt and uncle’s house down the street. My mother would take me to the library in my hometown, and I’d dart directly to the row of oversized art books. Trips to the Museum of Fine Arts and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, or the Currier Gallery in Manchester, N.H., were common. So art was everywhere. I grew up loving, and still love, painters who figure prominently in not only my book but how I see the world—Homer, Wyeth. I’ve come to love painters who capture strangeness and the visceral in their work—Gottlieb and the AbEx painters.
“Cicero, Keats, Stevens, Ashbery, Bernstein, Paquin.” Is that how you see it?
That was definitely one of the jokey, self-effacing moments from one of my poems. I’m willing to turn myself into an object of doubt and derision, too. No one, and nothing, should be off-limits.
Elizabeth Licata is editor of Buffalo Spree.
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