Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections, Fruit, winner of the Four Lakes Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press; Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press/LSU); The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin); and he is co-editor with Shara Lessley of The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice. He is currently chair of English at the University of San Francisco.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Perhaps because one of the first poems I encountered from this collection was “Devotions,” a crown of sonnets in which a speaker and his partner unsuccessfully attempt to adopt a child, I initially approached Fruit as one grappling with the pains, pressures, and pleasures of procreation. As I read, however, it became clear that fruiting is inextricable from inheritance. Can you speak some about how these two entwine either in individual poems or the collection?

BS: Fruit started in response to my partner’s and my decision not to have kids. I’d read many books and poems about parenthood (particularly motherhood), but I’d never read anything about not having kids. As a first-born son of a first-born son reared in a very conservative and religious small town in rural America, I grew up steeped in the patriarchal narratives of The Old Testament, so many of which, especially Genesis, are all about the centrality of male inheritance. Men matter to the extent that they are makers of other men (this, of course, is no less true for the women of the OT).

Through my own experiences, I was also aware of how much children seem to mediate people’s relationship to death—humans live on in their children—which made me wonder about the social narratives for non-reproductive people. How does not procreating invite us to think differently about death, life, meaning, etc.? Writing poems, I realized, involves another kind of making, poetic form itself an inheritance in which repetition, the essence of form, mirrors the foundational element of reproduction. The making of children is essentially genetic repetition/pattern making. I found myself remembering Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book,” particularly that first line: “Though ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain.”

As for the poem “Devotions,” it was one of the first poems written for the book and was inspired by old friends in Indiana. At some point I realized I’d never seen their story written before. I was especially struck by how theirs was such a modern story—considering that they were an out Christian gay couple struggling to adopt—and yet theirs was also an ancient story of love and faith. Some of the questions they were asking at the time resonated with me personally, so I found myself wanting to write some version of what they were going through.

CL: Your mention of repeated forms has me thinking of “Twin Peaks Bar, San Francisco,” a villanelle in which the speaker sits at the first gay bar with windows, watching passersby and talking with the bartender who has come west from a rural childhood and lived the beginnings of the gay rights movement alongside the AIDS epidemic. Despite Ralph’s (the bartender’s) extraordinary witness, it is his disappearance that the form reinforces at the end:

…So many people can’t get past

the loss, he shrugs and takes my cash.
You’ll learn that, Doll. He wipes the bar,
my own face taking shape against the glass

that holds his quickened hands still mixing
grenadine, lemon juice, rum into a silver flask.
He turns toward all the people walking past
and shakes and stirs, and fades into the glass.

Elsewhere, the book is punctuated by prose poems all titled “Childless,” which seem to navigate uncharted relationships with both children and mortality. How do you see these “Childless” pieces in conversation with the rest of the book, and one another? Does it make new continuities possible? What can a prose poem do that closed form cannot?

BS: Great question. I love talking about poetic form, which I value in part for its ability to embody contradictions in endlessly surprising ways. It’s generative (almost reproductive) yet is driven by limitation. As Louise Glück famously wrote: “a love of form is a love of endings”—form is inevitably rooted in an awareness of death. I found myself drawn to this tension in “Twin Peaks Bar, San Francisco” because I see it as a poem about, at least in part, the passing on of queer history, which is something most gay people can’t get from their biological families. This is a different kind of inheritance, but it’s akin to the passing on of any family history.

The “Childless” poems were the last poems I wrote for the collection. I’d been writing all these poems about biology, genealogy, inheritance, and death, but I sensed the book was missing the lived experience/occasion that had driven my initial interest in these subjects. I wanted the prose poem to function as a kind of formal breath between the more intricate closed forms (sestinas, sonnets, villanelle, etc.). There’s something wonderfully unfussy about prose poems. They’re these great democratizing blocks of language that I instinctively felt would be well suited for the kind of little diary-like narrative moments, which I hoped would more fully dramatize the book’s human dimension.

CL: I love hearing people talk about form; just recently another writer told me she avoids imitations and teaching form, at least at first, because so many students have a fill-in-the-blanks mentality, and never escape copying. And yet people are often drawn to formal poems from the outset—songs, nursery rhymes—this love of endings is how they enter. Looking back through, so many of these free verse poems are stories of beginnings! I think right away of “Litany for my Father’s Sperm” which addresses the “little Winnebagos / on creation’s road” who are “all lightning / and volcano, all / whip-tailed fallout / from the Big Bang.” Or “Creation Myth” which so vividly paints the speaker’s origins as he states “I breathe in arc welders and air compressors. / I breathe out milk leaking from nurse cows…I’m run through with moths and meth labs, a child of the KKK, men who lynched Tom Shipp from a split / oak in Marion, August 1930. My cells / carry his shadow swaying over uncut grass.” And yet the beginnings seem like endings, too, as the speaker is in part defined by what he has inherited. Even within a single poem we can see the shift; “One Day, He Said, I’d Carry on the Family Name” ends:

What in me, I wonder, is me
as the world goes on copying itself—
black seeds sprouting green,
egg sacks on the gray spider.
I walk to where the iron gates open
to the corner graveyard and
the stones say: Snider, Snider, Snider.

In light of this piece, and the “Creation Myth” mentioned above, I wonder about the difference between inheritance (or an inherited form) and connectedness. I hear the echoes of “spider” and “Snider,” but they are not the same. The speaker of these poems tries to parse “what in me…is me,” which is a fundamental ontological question so (how) are lyric poems uniquely equipped to address these questions? How do you think “myth” is functioning, especially within the context of (self) creation?

BS: It’s interesting because I’ve had such a different experience with students and closed form. I’ve always had students whose work doesn’t come alive until I have them write a sonnet or villanelle or pantoum, etc. I think it’s because those forms demand you use language in ways we tend to value in poetry, especially compression and various sorts of repetition. Part of the trick, though, is providing a range of examples, so students can see the enormously diverse ways different poets have used a given form. I’ve also found it makes a difference how you frame the approach to closed form, emphasizing that any closed form is defined less by how it perfects its formal limitations and more by how it meaningfully resists them, the poet pushing against a set of “rules” even as they surrender to them.

As for connectedness, I think that’s one of the essential aspects of closed form, the sense that the minute you write a sonnet, for example, you’re locating your poem in a larger tradition(s)/ conversation(s) that stretches from Petrarch to Gwendolyn Brooks to DA Powell and on and on. Of course, these traditions are often contested in various ways but, in my experience, we tend to read any sonnet in part through the lens of the sonnets we’ve read before. A form like the sonnet is not only technically useful, but it’s an immediate and very pointed way of speaking back to the past.

I also think there’s some dimension of belonging in all this, which may be related to this idea of “connectedness.” As someone who’s written a lot about place (my home state of Indiana in particular), I’ve come to realize that writing can be a way of making or experiencing a kind of belonging that may not have occurred in the physical world. There’s a claiming that can occur the moment you start to describe a place. Likewise, I think poetic form, which has long been rooted in the language of place (as most poets know, for example, stanza means “room,” in Italian, etc.) can be used in a way that invents belonging. In this sense, I think some poets remake the formal tradition in order to belong to it, changing or enlarging it to make space for them and their experiences.

I’m sure all of this also relates to your question about myth and self-creation, since I suspect most of us create our self-stories in relationship to the larger cultural stories and myths that we’re born into. Understanding how our personal stories “connect” to the larger cultural stories is itself a kind of belonging. When you can’t find yourself in the larger narrative, you sometimes rewrite it. I suppose poetry, both lyric and narrative, has become a way for me to do that.

CL: I love what you say about claiming through description. And all of Fruit renders place so richly, often in ways that enact a new type of relationship. For example, in “Cleaning My Father’s Rifle,” the speaker describes how “scrubbing / night from / the weed choked pond, I erase / the dense / shroud of fog that speaks / his name. I wipe away / his good judgment, his better / aim, scouring // loneliness from / the huckleberry / patch where he knelt to split / the body open, / lungs glistening in / their bone cage, / gut steaming // its sour gas.” We see place via a negation of sorts, yet one that remakes in the process. Many of these poems, like you said earlier, long for a belonging that did not exist; similarly, pastoral poems often idealize or romanticize a place that perhaps never existed. So I wonder if you think of your work as in, or in friction with, the pastoral tradition? How, or do, these differ from what I read as a forward-looking nostalgia in other pieces? Ones that perhaps mourn what will never be? What role does nostalgia play in the re-visioning?

BS: I love your observation regarding the description of place through negation. I wasn’t conscious of that, but it makes sense. I’ve always loved Wallace Stevens’ “Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock,” which so vividly describe a colorless place in terms of the colorful things that are NOT there. And I’m also reminded of “My Dark Apartment,” James Schuyler’s poem about a place he once shared with a former lover, its rooms described in terms of what’s missing: “an antique chest,” “an air conditioner,” even the missing lover himself. As we all know, place is often defined by loss or, as you note, by what we wish we could erase. As a poet, I’m always drawn to places that demand some negotiation between self and landscape.

This also relates to your question about the pastoral, a tradition I definitely had in mind when writing Fruit. In fact, in some ways the book’s origins are bound up in my response to how literature and culture have defined the natural. The earliest Judeo-Christian nature writings that I’m aware of are the Garden of Eden sections from “Genesis,” which of course lay out a story of sin and expulsion. This stands in such contrast to passages from Virgil’s “The Eclogues,” which celebrate same-sex love and attraction. Naturally, growing up where I did, the Christian-Judeo myths were dominant, and as a queer person whose feelings and desires were defined as unnatural, even anti-nature, I found myself wanting to locate queer love and desire very purposefully in a natural rural landscape. So even as my work is in tension with Judeo-Christian notions of the natural, I also see it in relationship to the Greek tradition, which has long been a source of influence and inspiration for queer writers.

CL: And in your pieces queer love(ers) are not only located in a natural landscape, but created out of one—in the “Creation Myth” poem referenced earlier, the speaker is the “child of sumacs, trash trees shedding their ancient scales…molecules / spat from coal and cattle, the Indiana dusk.” Later in the collection, when the same title re-appears, that creation myth is an echo of the Pygmalion story, namely that “semen was liquefied brain, a drop / of pure human thought making / its way out of one body and into another.” With this logic, the speaker fills with his lover’s thoughts until “I am what you are thinking.”

It fascinates me that these poems are myth, since they each seem very true instances of identity-formation. In the Greek, while both have some relationship to ‘word,’ mythos and logos are seen as separate things, yet in your pieces they blur. There’s Dalton’s atomic theory in “my cells carry his shadow swaying over uncut grass”; I can’t help but hear God in the burning bush when the speaker of the second myth states “I am” what you are thinking. In John, “I am” also gets defined as logos, so I wonder about the interplay of it and mythos, in your work. Are these poems myths? Or what does it mean to write your own creation myths, especially when myths claim logos? What role does naming have to play, both in the mythic and the scientific? How (or does) this tie into the lexicons you employ?

BS: I love the connections you’re making. When you refer to “true” instances of identity formation, though, do you mean factual or biological or something else? Biblical myths were among the first stories I encountered and certainly the first communal/cultural stories I felt encouraged, even pressured, to use to construct or understand my personal story. I don’t see their impacts on my identity as any less true or legitimate. For me, they’re ultimately just inadequate on their own. I think of myth as one of many ways humans have tried to make sense of the world and their place in it. When I use the word in the “Creation Myth” poems, I think I’m using it to refer to narratives of self-making. For me, those narratives were initially Biblical, but in time I located other essential stories in history, science, even the landscape itself, and so I write them into my own idiosyncratic creation myths.

I think many queer writers have tried to write alternative creation myths because traditional western myths rarely make room for us. I’m thinking, for example, of Elizabeth Bradfield’s “Creation Myth: Periosteum and Self,” in which the speaker imagines herself growing antlers, noting that female deer “produce young each year. Males grow antlers.” Or Greg Wrenn’s wonderful long poem, “Centaur,” in which the speaker undergoes surgery to literally become a centaur. Both poems embrace the bestial, the mixing of human and animal, which of course is common in Greek and Roman myth, but which doesn’t happen in the same way in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, I love science in part because of how fully it acknowledges human beings as animals. This reframes the natural in essential ways for queer people.

As for your question about “naming,” I think a name is yet another way we get located in the world. Often it’s intended to connect us to the people and traditions that preceded us. In my case, I was named after my father but was nothing like him, which seemed to point out how poorly I measured up. I have a vivid memory of riding the bus home from junior high when a song by Bruce Springsteen came on the radio. The group of girls sitting in front of me started talking about how the name Bruce made them think of a big burly tough guy. When they turned and realized that I—a skinny, bookish Bruce with glasses—was sitting behind them, they all burst into laughter. Most of us don’t get to choose our names but we’re marked by the expectations they carry.

CL: And maybe that’s where poetry deviates from other forms of naming, like taxonomy, or even christening. Because when we identify a plant, for example, Linnaean classification will group creatures of kind, and yet—the Bruce on the bus is very different from the Bruce born to run! To me at least, one of the most definitive aspects of poems is the upending they do, the way they denote in a way other forms cannot by re-arranging the same blocks of language. Like Mendel with his peas, you might think you’re getting a certain type, and end up with a very different fruit! How (do) your poems surprise you? And what traits do you deem necessary to classify a poem as such?

BS: I’ve always liked William Stafford’s definition of poetry, and I’m paraphrasing here: poetry is something said in such a way or put on the page in such a way so as to demand a certain kind of attention. Personally, I often know I’m working on a poem when the piece of writing has a particular investment in form, usually a coming together of sound-patterning, sensory language, and metaphor to express something. And I think surprise is an essential ingredient in this mix. If a poem isn’t surprising me as I’m writing it, I know something’s wrong. For me, poetry has always been a way of thinking, a way to interrogate and complicate my initial impulses and assumptions. My poems continue to surprise me in every way possible—musically, thematically, etc. For example, I had no intention of writing sestinas (for years, I never even liked sestinas), but social media and the Trump administration had me thinking about the form (I wrote an essay about this, which you can read here), so I started experimenting a bit and wrote the poem “Fruit,” which became the book’s title poem. And while writing that poem, I had no idea the end word six would become sex in stanza three (I was just following sound), but the change opened the poem for me in a new way that informed the rest of the draft. In fact, every poem in Fruit surprised me in some way or I wouldn’t have included it in the book.

CL: And amidst peaches for an art class still life and a teenager fantasizing about his classmates, at first one might not notice that “Fruit” is a sestina!

In a collection so steeped in nature and natural history and invested in troubling what we deem as such, could you speak to the relationship between the natural (which might go back to my questions of spontaneity or surprise) and artificial, either in terms of process or the claims these poems make? What possibilities do poems offer (or responsibilities do they have) in our torrent of information overload, mistrust, and environmental chaos?

BS: If anything, I’m suspicious (and I suspect Fruit is too) of the neat distinctions often made between the natural and the artificial, in part because they tend to be self-serving and carry unspoken moral judgments. They also tend to emphasize humankind’s separateness from nature as if a computer or a sestina, for example, is somehow more artificial than a beehive or a beaver’s dam. If humans are a part of nature (and not above it as Genesis might suggest) isn’t anything we create also a part of nature? Isn’t it “natural?” I don’t want to oversimply this point, but humans have long been quick to separate themselves from “nature” as a way to justify dominion over it.

As for what poetry should do, I’m generally reluctant to assign it chores. Probably because I like to think of poetry as a disruptor. Personally, though, I’d say it offers me an antidote to the commodification of language and the simplistic performances of self endlessly incentivized by social media, capitalism, cable news, and the rest. I think great poems (or at least my favorites) insist on complication and are at their most exciting when they’re a container for/expression of what’s unresolvable. They’re less interested in the good versus the bad, for example, than in looking at how inextricably woven together the good and the bad almost always are. In an era that prioritizes speed, I also love how poems slow me down, insisting I linger, that I read and think, then reread and reread again. I also believe that ultimately the language of poetry is the language of connection. I don’t read a poem to be outraged or politically affirmed but to understand, to be moved, delighted, to see the world anew. Poems are the most amazing of human creations, artificial and stylized and phony and authentic and incredibly natural.

CL: Agreed. If you were to meet someone with little exposure to poems, which one would you share first?

BS: Possibly Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” because it’s the kind of poem that opens to you immediately but continues to reveal its depths and complexities the more you read it. Or maybe Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Or maybe Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Kitchenette Building.” All for the same reasons. When it comes to poems, it’s always so hard for me to pick just one.