Zach Savich: I was thinking of starting by talking about phones. Because that’s a central image. When we first met, I’d probably had a cell phone for a year. You were probably in there just with your first name for a really long time. Which, you know, you still could be. That also worked because we were in Iowa City and you almost didn’t need a phone. You could just run into people. What are your Iowa City phone memories?

Caryl Pagel: Iowa City was a magical place, in terms of communication. I don’t remember calling anyone. You just walked out and you went to the place where you knew the people would be, right? You did have to leave your house.

ZS: It made it feel like there was more telepathy than there was—telephonery. We could have just had one phone for everyone we knew. Whenever you pick it up, you can talk to anyone else who has picked it up. And sometimes you were just talking to yourself. But into the same air.

CP: I remember the feeling of going out in public or being in a public space in order to ignore someone. In Iowa City, or maybe just those years, you still had to all be in a room together to ghost someone.

Toward the end of my time living there, I did start to have the somewhat delusional feeling that I could predict the coincidences. I remember one day thinking I’m going to take a walk and I was walking and thinking, feeling good and lively, and I was like, you know, the person I’d like to see right now is V. And one second later V. came, like, tearing around the corner in a car. I don’t think I’d ever seen him drive a car before. He just leans over and opens the passenger-side door and is like, hey, Pagel, get in. That’s the moment where I was like, Are we making this happen?—

ZS: Yes.

CP: —which is a silly and dangerous feeling.

ZS: I like that it’s just statistical probabilities, which let you feel like things can manifest.

CP: Right.

ZS: Also, related to these projects, on Niedecker and Roethke, there’s the Jack Spicerian sense of tuning the radios to try to receive transmissions, which is like the gathering of the ghosts. And sometimes that’s V. in a car. But I like this idea that you can also ghost the ghosts. You can also ignore them.

CP: Yesterday one of W.’s friends from daycare—you know, this little guy, he’s like three or something—his mom sent a picture of him holding an old rotary play phone, trying to call W., and we were imagining a picture to send back. The obvious options are holding a banana or using phone fingers. During the time I’ve been working on the Niedecker project I’ve been trying to hold the phone out to her. But also to you or two or three other people who are part of the conversation I’m having in my mind in order to write the book. The other people I’m envisioning listening. So it’s a grounding feeling to even—

ZS: Mmm.

CP: —pretend, to feel like you’re talking—

ZS: Mm.

CP: —to someone. Even if they’re not on the other line.

ZS: There’s such sweetness in that because, you know, Niedecker will never know in this world what you’re saying to her. But also I will never know some of those things you’re saying to me. But also I love the banana phone. Screaming into bananas, banana phones, that gesture and reference, will be around long after real phones. And I know you slipped on the peel of one, writing into A Field of Telephones, the section you wrote, about Niedecker…

CP: Slipping into A Field of Telephones has been delightful—because I get to think about my book’s subject inside of your voice and play and pacing. A new form for the same content, a dream. The writing in AFOT is faster, more performative than my own and it’s fun to consider Niedecker in this loose cool version, in conversation with Roethke and you. I think she’d have liked that. Your prose is so open and permissive. I tend toward—I go a little slower and so—I don’t know if this is a stretch, but I’ll just throw it out there—

ZS: Hmm.

CP: —that Roethke—one of the things I feel like you’re writing about is—well, he’s very prolific, like, exuberant, you know, all those poems so densely pleasurably sing-songing, others vibrating with a heavy music, and I get from your book’s description of all his journals that he must have been writing all the time—

ZS: Yep.

CP: —and that’s one way I think of you. You’re always in it. Experimenting. Escalating. And then in my own project how obsessed with Niedecker’s humor I’ve become and I wonder—I didn’t have this thought until I started to think about you and Roethke—

ZS: Mmm.

CP: But the deeper I get into it the more I find out through the archives and letters that she’s just so funny—

ZS: Mmm!!

CP: —funnier than I even knew, as a poet, and friend, but I feel like her writing has been taken a little bit—it’s like you could read her work and not laugh, if you weren’t looking for it. [1] Her humor is, for some readers—at a distance. Unpeeled? But once you catch it—it’s all a joke. There’s a—

ZS: Yeah.

CP: —depth of humor, which I’ve come to see—as integral to her process, her friendships—a primary motivation.

ZS: Oh, you’re so brilliant!

CP: Oh, you’re so brilliant!

ZS: There’s so much there. You’re such a genius. You mentioned your delight, for the buried jokes. And there are so many times when I smile, like reading your essays, because there are so many sly and wry moments where I know you’re delighted. But I also know that the tone, because of how syntax is working sometimes with a different kind of rhythm—

CP: Yeah.

ZS: —is also sweeping in multiple ways at once. I was thinking about how one thing we’ve talked about with the play was having “Caryl” show up and laugh, at moments when maybe no one else is laughing.

CP: (Laughs)

ZS: Do you think, with Niedecker, and people not seeing her humor—is this another way that she maybe has been ill-served by being affiliated with, like, Objectivism, certain poetics. I’m thinking about your mentioning things that are problems in a critical poetics context but not in a folk tradition. For example, being “too derivative.” If you’re in a folk tradition—that’s what it’s all about. With humor, if you read Niedecker with that in mind—humor in the folk tradition was about the things that would make you smile, keep people awake, and, like, compensate for how horrible your day was. What do you think?

CP: The rest of the Objectivists weren’t—any of the rest of them—as funny in my opinion. In some of the letters back to her, from Zukofsky or Corman or whoever, they had levity, they can be kind and curious, but not funny in the way she’s funny. Zukofsky’s poems, often when about his kid, were sweet. But there weren’t the same winks and pranks for everyone. Though that’s not how she’s talked about. This won’t surprise you, but I can’t help but think about it in gendered terms.

ZS: Yeah.

CP: The way in which women are or aren’t permitted to joke. The way in which they are or aren’t heard when they do. The way humor, as a form of intelligence, is associated with power. You don’t want to be funnier than the men in the room, that’s threatening. And if you dare—it doesn’t always work because humor requires the telephone. Someone has to pick up. It requires the participation of others, their willingness to be vulnerable to your turns or goofs. Maybe you bury it a little, so it’s there for those who are receptive.

ZS: Mm-hm.

CP: And also with Niedecker, she researched so much, she was such a studious person, such an avid and serious reader. And as part of her process she compressed a lot of that research, a lot of that overheard and gathered language, into just a joke or two, a sharp observation, surprising line.

ZS: I love her doing a ton of research to get one joke. That’s also a way of working in the margins of an existing text, of an archive. And it’s a way of having a private joke, which speaks back to research with just one line. You got me thinking about wit, or being witty, versus being a clown, more boisterous. When I think of those dudely Objectivists, they have some intricate wit, exacerbated to the point of not being funny. But they succeed in compacting it into poems with postures of significance. Of the monument. Maybe Niedecker wasn’t given the chance to clown, to be a clown, so she became a private one. But she’s not—I’m thinking of Kenneth Koch or someone like that, “funny” poets, who write comedy. Her comedy was often more like she’s already established a shadow that she’s playing with. And then she winks at the shadow.

CP: Right. Another complication is that when she talks about her work, which is not very often—or at least not much of it survived, mostly in letters to Zukofsky and Corman—she’s pretty serious. She was this really thoughtful reader and thinker—in part thinking she needed to keep up—who absolutely embraced Objectivist and Modernist strategies, but then I think the humor was just her. It slipped in there. Folk influence, as you mention. Her early poems especially can read like a laugh with friends[2], an instinct toward deflection—or maybe a neighborly Midwestern rhetorical positioning.

ZS: With Roethke, he has poems that are trying to be funny, self-consciously witty. They would have played for laughs in certain settings, but they’re much less funny than moments that feel more spontaneous or uncontrolled. I was looking at some poems from Niedecker’s For Paul yesterday and noting exactly what you’re talking about. And I was thinking about it in relation to contemporary writers, like the brilliant Adrienne Raphel, and a kind of restlessness or desire to undercut the expectations of a ballad rhythm. That is, to use those rhythms more by also shifting around them, shifting them around. And the way I read that in Niedecker, it’s like someone who feels the engine of the ballad start to get going, and then they’re like, all right, I’ve already started that. So in one sense it will now complete itself. It’s already extending. So now I can cut a different way against that current. Or have a rhyme that’s going to come in much later than you’re expecting, and suddenly it will reverberate back through everything and you’ll realize the whole thing was more like a song.

CP: Totally.

ZS: Or she’ll do the other thing, where it becomes a fragment suddenly. Where she’s like, I’m not even going to finish writing this out. I’m just going to give you the skeleton, just one bone.

CP: Yeah, absolutely. Ghosted ghost bone reverberating. Also, returning to your comment about Roethke, I think of that poem that you read when we were in Saginaw, doing that workshop—

ZS: Dinky! His poem, “Dirty Dinky.”

CP: Yeah. It’s an example of the reverse: so silly and rhymey, who wouldn’t laugh? But it’s scary. It’s so scary. It scared the shit out of me.

ZS: His poems for children—I guess I don’t even think of them as funny because they’re often in relation to nonsense and also they’re really weird. Partly because they also feel so familiar, even generic. But they’re fucked.

CP: Yeah.

ZS: They do that thing where part of your body starts to laugh, because of the form, while your stomach turns in relation to either content or how things don’t quite come together. The form lurches, or launches, or collapses.

CP: That’s great. So—I just finished reading Isaac Jarnot’s Four Lectures.

ZS: Nice.

CP: I’ve always liked Jarnot’s work and haven’t read the Duncan biography yet but Duncan’s The H.D. Book has been on my mind. To address your question from our earlier talk, about scholarship, about forms outside of the typical scholarly or academic modes and discourses, or whatever—there’s the H.D. stuff from Duncan and I know we’re both fans of that Dyer book on D.H. I also like Hilton Al’s My Pinup, Marie Darrieussecq’s Being Here Is Everything, and Dan Beachy-Quick’s writing into Moby-Dick in The Whaler’s Dictionary. Loose, expansive, curious mixes of critical writing, memoir, and biography. Maybe—a question we don’t have to get into here—is, like, we’ve both turned forty in the last few years… Birthdays coinciding with lineage projects… Have we graduated to answering history’s ring? Is Roethke…our…dad?

ZS: Mmm.

CP: Or, like, who are my fucking models for what happens next? Niedecker got better and smarter and sharper with age. Maybe that’s what I need to think about right now. I mean, not that she wasn’t already a beautiful writer and, like, a cool person, but she really wrote some of her best work in her 60s (which was also in the 60s), including a genius trio of long poems—“Lake Superior,” “Wintergreen Ridge,” and “Paean to Place”—responding to the environmental politics of the moment—combining Objectivist, Surrealist, Imagist, essayistic, conservationist, and documentary gestures—she was just on fire, gaining insight, connecting…

ZS: Hmm.

CP: Oh, and back to the Jarnot book. It’s a series of lectures about Jarnot’s youth in Buffalo, reading Duncan. There’s this part. I guess it’s just the second page. I’ll just read it to you. Jarnot’s writing about aesthetics and a prophetic lineage or creative prophetic form and Melville and Whitehead and Ginsberg and then says “I don’t want to wield these texts as an intellectual currency; I want to use them to tell a tale. I seem to have the mind of a poet, which makes me good at poaching and weaving, and not so inclined to traditionally academic discourse… I’m also a “townie:…who found my way into an intellectual world by the accident of being in the right low-tuition public university at the right time…SUNY Buffalo in the 1980s.”

ZS: Hmm.

CP: When I read that, I thought, wow, okay, so Jarnot, one of my heroes, isn’t apologizing for not being or becoming a scholar. A poet can do this. A poet should do this. Jarnot’s writing about Duncan from a place of curiosity and intimacy and love. A reader’s point of view. Which is what I hope to do, but as you know, it can feel like a great responsibility to write about somebody who a lot of people love.

ZS: Yes.

CP: And who many, many people have done brilliant archival, biographical, and scholarly work on. Jenny Penberthy for example. Her work is extraordinary, groundbreaking. You can’t help but wonder—who am I to write about Niedecker? So for me, it’s been about finding new shapes, writing about Niedecker’s writing as a writer, calling up the fun, the relevant, and the energizing. I think about my students and what they’d like to read. I think about my connections to Wisconsin—who are the great documenters of Packers jokes? [3] Jarnot got into Duncan in part because of a proximity to his presence and archives in Buffalo.

ZS: Mm-hmm.

CP: And I guess similarly I’ve chosen to spend a lot of time thinking about a poet who I have regional overlap with. I first learned about Niedecker, I think, not from school, or my own reading, but from Woodland Pattern, a bookstore that for decades has fostered a community around her work. And I do think I understand some of the cultural context of where she lived. Or I have a personal incentive to wonder about it because of my own past. Perhaps this was similar for you with Roethke. The Michigan and Pacific Northwest stuff. Where you’ve also lived. It’s just, like, grounding intersections. It’s something. A place to start. Like when Niedecker makes her condensery jokes—I don’t know if everyone is familiar with milk condenseries. I come from a family of farmers. I know dairy jokes. [4] 

ZS: Absolutely.

CP: And for you and Roethke?

ZS: There’s a friend sense, but he’s not my favorite poet, you know? But he’s a poet who I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s more familial? And it got reactivated for me because of region, as you mentioned. From realizing that now, in Cleveland, we’re close-ish to Saginaw, where he’s from. But I’m curious about the expertise angle. I’ve read a lot of books about the dude, but I’ve also resisted becoming an expert, in certain ways. Like, I haven’t done all the reading that I would if I were in PhD program, writing a dissertation. Or writing a proper biography. Where are you in relation to that—and what’s that about? The getting expertise, but also resisting it—not just resisting our claiming or owning it, but resisting having it?

CP: I started by being, like, first I have to read everything that’s ever been written about her, and I checked out all the books from the library and, for her, there isn’t a whole ton of traditional biography. [5] So I have less of a weight, I think, than you do in that way. About her, there are famously a lot of rumors, poor reporting, assumptions. But there’s also a lot of pressure because the people who have written about her are incredible. Like Elizabeth Willis and Jenny Penberthy and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Heroes of feminist scholarship. So I sat down to read it all and I did do that for maybe, I don’t know, some amount of time, six months. Just taking notes, being a real student, and it was beautiful and helpful and also filling me with an anxiety so intense I couldn’t write.

ZS: Hmm.

CP: So then I just stopped. I realized—I want an active living relationship with her poems. I need to, as you say, resist a total expertise—in order to stay curious. I need the mystery to write. Even if it’s a more vulnerable position to be engaging from. Not knowing everything. Maybe I’ll return to the scholarship later. And—like with the humor conversation—I was having so much fun reading and wasn’t finding that aspect satisfyingly reflected back in the academic discourse. And also—biography is a little creepy? Like if someone tried to write about my life based on my emails?

ZS: Yes.

CP: I needed a more intuitive, stupid, joyful way forward. I needed the research to take the form of adventure. So now the book is me re-reading her poems over and over while traveling around Lake Superior, researching quagga mussels, drinking Grasshoppers, and hanging out with all the Wisconsin poets who love her in the places where her poems come from—

ZS: Ohh cool.

CP: So I guess I’m spending time where she spent time. Which is like “researching” the place I’m from. So if I have the chance to go do some research, and I do it, and I go, the place I go is home.







Notes and Jokes Cited

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[1] “We must pull / the curtains—/ we haven’t any / leaves”

[2] “What a / white muffler / in a dark coat / will do for a / dull man.”

[3] Well, there’s Letters to Matt LaFleur by Matthew Mabis, recommended to me by Nick Gulig.

[4] What did the farmer say to the calf? It’s pasture bedtime!

[5] In a 1951 letter to Zukofsky: “Yes, someday I’ll write your biography with your help—”