Poet to Watch: Wesley Rothman
Wesley Rothman’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Review, Mississippi Review, Narrative, New England Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Vinyl, Waccamaw, Waxwing, and The White Review, among others. He serves as an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly and teaches writing and cultural literatures throughout Boston. Recent honors include Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a Vermont Studio Center fellowship. His manuscript, SUBWOOFER, was recently a finalist for the Crab Orchard Poetry Series Open Competition.
Phillip: Wesley, thank you for agreeing to speak with me today.
Wesley: Thanks for reaching out to me!
P: I want to start with how you got into writing. What was the first poem you read and what did you think after having experienced it?
W: Well, in elementary and middle school I was dead set on becoming a mathematician. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I was all about math. When I graduated from 8th grade I was so discouraged I didn’t receive the special award for math. Didn’t really care that I received some certificate or something for Language Arts.
I genuinely don’t remember the first poem I read; probably a Frost poem in elementary school, or a nursery rhyme. I do remember reading Dickinson and Whitman in my junior year of high school. Hated Dickinson, loved Whitman. I ended up writing my senior project about “Song of Myself.” That year was when I came to writing in some kind of earnest way. My teacher, Mr. Beckman (he would hate that I’m referring to him that way here… Greg), made all forms of literature real to me for the first time, especially poetry. So much so I remember going to detention of my own volition just to talk with him about whatever we happened to be reading, on multiple occasions. He moderated detention. While reading Whitman I was enamoured of the philosophy, the foreign thought and frame of it. I was definitely down. The poems Greg encouraged me to write, ones he semi-workshopped, were god-awful (sp?), something about feeling left out. There was actually one that wasn’t completely horrendous, I thought, something about hands. Then I got lucky in college; Jericho Brown joined the faculty my sophomore year.
P: And what did meeting Jericho Brown mean to you? Was he a major influence?
W: My first year of college I was on the fence between pursuing psychology or English, and the poetry offerings/pursuits were so-so. I didn’t know who he was before he came to campus–Please wasn’t yet a thing in the world, and I didn’t know much about the poetry world. The first day of workshop he had to be out of town or something, and he wrote an introductory letter that we were given with the syllabus. He sounded like a hardass: (stern voice) “This class is going to be hard, and you’re going to have to work as diligently as you would in any other course…” and all that. I was a little intimidated, but later in the semester, and over the next couple years, as I got to know him, his commitment to poems, his work, his singing, his outward fearlessness, among other things, I discovered what a softy he usually is. Well, depending on the moment. He was and continues to be one of my greatest influences. He introduced me to Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey’s work. He eased me into contemporary poetry. He cultivated and cultivates me, gave me some things to care about in this life. I’ll stop before I gush too much more.
P: It’s rare that we as writers find that level of mentorship so I understand the need to gush! So we move forward into your career and you start sending poems out. What did you find were your obsessions? What inspired your first published poems and do you see those themes recurring in later poems?
W: I was reading all of Natasha Trethewey’s books over and over, especially Native Guard, and I suppose that tipped me in a particular direction. Early on I was writing mostly elegies for friends and ancestors, obsessing over southern history, of which I felt I had no direct ties, obsessing over my mom’s exodus from the south without looking back. I wrote a series of poems about the Little Rock Nine at one point. Some echoes of these are still present, but so much less literal. I think these concerns have shifted toward the nature of history, particularly that of America, how we are constantly pregnant with it, and how we maneuver or are maneuvered by that reality. Elegies are still real for what I’m writing, but they’re not so much about people I knew and lost in high school or my grandfather, the elegiac impulse is a constant tone in my current work, as it is in so many contemporary poets’ work. Most of my recent poems wade in who we lose, what we lose not only as a result of violence but as a result of mindset. Jericho introduced me to the poets who have hit me hardest, but there has been a vast constellation of influences that have brought me to explore bigotry and [white] privilege and mind and act. I think that’s what I’m up to.
P: That sounds like a tough job, to create poems about concepts of race and white privilege when so frequently we are told that politics mixed with poetry are a troubled water, which you and I know is a historical fallacy. Have you ever received pushback because of what you write about?
W: I do my best to shut the hell up when other people are talking, so I can understand them a little bit better, but I just can’t figure out, for real, how people avoid the political in their work or think they do or wish they could. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good pastoral (not that a pastoral can’t be political), but I just have a harder time having an experience with a “pure” pastoral than I do with something more actively or explicitly human, which to me kind of always has a dash of the political in it.
I’ve never received outright pushback to my face. I’ve been discouraged by people, or rather, encouraged not to write about race and privilege and violence and politics. I have a catalog of memories connected to this! After a Brian Turner reading once, I had to leave the auditorium next to a guy who couldn’t stop spitting vitriol: “I go to poems to escape the war! Why the hell would anyone want to read that?!” On another occasion, I was present when a well established poetry critic made a passing joke that I haven’t heard about white poets who have engaged race and privilege because they wrote about race and privilege–they were easy to forget or obscure. I’m sure there is or would be pushback to what I’m working through, but I’m also hyper-concerned with the how of these poems, that they give hard looks and listens so that readers can do the same. Sometimes stirring pushback is important, but sometimes it alienates readers/listeners too much, to a point when the poems won’t be able to reach them. They stop reading. So there’s a balance: disturbing readers without pushing them to pushback.
P: How does one tell or negotiate that balance? It seems difficult a task to distinguish between when a reader is disturbed and when they are pushing back? Can one happen without the other?
W: I’m not entirely sure how to measure it. It seems like a matter of asking root questions rather than reading a list of indictments, which is tempting sometimes. As a reader, there have been many times I’ve been disturbed but haven’t pushed back too far. I suppose some pushback, some tension or resistance is necessary, because it means the poem is pushing on an unworked or tight spot, it means we’re getting to something longheld and possibly unfamiliar. But I think the term pushback is tricky too, because it could also mean dismissal or utter resistance, both of which are difficult reactions from which to recover. When reading James Baldwin and Audre Lorde I’ve been disturbed but haven’t pushed back harder than they’ve pushed me, and fortunately so. There’s a continuum of pushback, of resistance, some is mild enough to work with, some is denser than diamond.
P: In the poem “SAMO ©”, you write:
“Same old verdict
Same ol’ war tug
Same old same old
Same old sucker punch
SAMO© hoodie
Same name shame”
Can you talk about the process of writing this poem and how you see the sonic properties of “same old” and “SAMO ©” as working together to complicate the context of the poem? Readers may need to know what “SAMO ©” is, too.
W: Yeah! SAMO© was and is famously a tagging identity for Al Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, also conveying the sentiment, “same old shit.” Basquiat used it in his studio work as well (and there’s a really fascinating narrative about this alias and the artists’ relationship). He eventually declared, citywide, “SAMO© is dead.” While making this poem I was just starting to grapple with history as a persona. I began drafting it during the trial of George Zimmerman, while I was reading a good deal of Baldwin for the first time, and trying to do Basquiat’s memory some justice. What I was hearing and feeling and probably finally truly understanding was that we were in a historical moment that was exactly that, the same old shit. “Same old” also took on some of the weight of “old thinking” and/or “tired excuses” and/or “sameness.” Same shit, new-ish contexts, new scenarios, new media, new generation(s).
P: That is a powerful answer, the poem utilizing other art as a source of inspiration, a tag by artists of color that for them worked as a political holler. So in many ways this poem is ekphrastic and honors the work of these artists. I see this poem as possibly an ars poetica, too, a nuanced look at how the poet feels about the landscape of poetry, rejecting the same old tropes and ideas of “low art” and “high art”.
W: Absolutely! It also feels more like it’s Basquiat’s poem than it is mine–I like that about it. I can only imagine what his responses would be to the past decade. This is probably a mild translation of what he would/could say and make.
I love the landscape of poetry, but as is probably noticeable in some of my earlier thoughts, there’s plenty that seems like empty “culture flexing.” Some people, it seems, are drawn to poetry because in their minds it’s sophisticated and has status. It is sophisticated, just not the way they want it to be, or at least I’m not interested in that. I want to make and read poems that are live and loud and fresh and unfamiliar and dirty. Put the polished silver away, the sparkling china, chuck it out the window, there’s plenty to read from way back.
P: Let’s shift a little and talk about your career as an editor and book reviewer. What were some lessons that poetry taught you which then informed your editorial practices and reviewing? Where have you edited and where have your reviews appeared? Did it come as a shock to you that you moved in this direction?
W: I always wanted to get into editing. Tried to build a journal in undergrad from scratch; it lived for one issue. As an editor and reviewer the impulse mentioned earlier has been a major influence. Just as I try to write and read jolting, live poems, poems that shift tectonically, my editing and reviewing gravitates in this direction. I’ve had editorial hands in Ploughshares, Copper Canyon Press, Tupelo Quarterly, and briefly Toe Good Poetry. I review regularly for American Microreviews and Interviews, and have had criticism in Rain Taxi Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, among some others. Not only do I look for work that is energetic and poignant and risky, I try to approach these tasks with a similar attitude: playful, sassy, pumped. Getting into reviewing was unexpected, but is so much fun. It’s demanding and puts me in a different rhetorical position than making poems or teaching or my own essay-attempt to make sense of things in and beyond poetry.
P: What was one of your favorite books to review? What did that book do that charged you to write about it?
W: I’m a glutton. Forgive me. I think Danez Smith’s [insert] boy has been my favorite to review. His use of the poem, his uses of language felt like permission to use language authentically, to speak in ways I had never spoken before. His book made me write a review like it was a poem or in dialogue with his poems–that is a brilliant book, and it broke me in some ways while igniting me in others. I also loved reviewing Ailish Hopper’s Dark~Sky Society. Those poems are difficult and elusive and real. She got me into a space I hadn’t really been before with poetry and with interrogating or facing privilege and history.
P: And with your own collection-in-progress, Subwoofer, you’ve seen what it’s like to complete a large set of poems that speak to one another across one or multiple themes. So you’ve not only read books and reviewed them, you’ve created your own. What was the process like and what can readers expect from Subwoofer? Also, how has the process of looking for a home for your book been?
W: True. I don’t know that I can say the process is past tense; it’s still happening. And it’s strange. Sometimes the concept of the collection seems to overtake what might be going on in a particular poem. Other times I find myself making new poems in the family of Subwoofer–this makes me think I could write this book forever, it seems endless. It probably is. But that’s taught me to shape and make decisions about what to include. I could keep writing but the first collection has to end, or be its own thing, at some point. I suppose it could be the first in a series. Ha! A series of poetry books. They exist but are rare.
Readers can expect thoughtful poems, or what I hope come across as thoughtful, contemplative, questioning. I’ve been working with the subwoofer as a metaphor, most particularly as resembling a mouth or an ear, which has led me to consider the actions of listening and speaking, in what order they occur, what roles they play in the mind’s development, our cultural development, our political identity. Readers can expect to be challenged, I think. Challenged in the sense of their thinking, and challenged poetically. With such nuanced and complex realities under the microscope, I think the poems have their own nuance and complexity. Some of them are tough, and ask a good deal of the reader: mentally, belief-wise, and as close examiners.
So far the process of finding Subwoofer a home has been encouraging. These things take time.
P: Wesley, thank you so much for your time. If people want to keep up with you and your work, where can they find you? Where is Wesley Rothman? What’s your Twitter handle haha?
W: Thank you, Phillip! I’m excited for Thief in the Interior! If people want to follow me, I’m on Twitter @wesleyrothman, or find me on Facebook. Poems and reviews and a website are in the digital ether as well. Thanks again for chatting with me!
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