Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, and The Interrogation. He is also the translator of The Popul Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions, and the chapbook Imaginary City (OW! Arts). His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Best New Poets. A longtime faculty member at The Blake School, Bazzett has received the Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. He lives in Minneapolis.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Since it is about to come out for the first time in English verse, I’ll start by asking about your translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh. How did you set out on this endeavor, and how has it changed your own writing? Do you think of the book as translating, or relaying?

MB: To be honest, I was well along the path on this endeavor before I even fully understood it was happening. Ten years ago, I lived in central Mexico for a sabbatical year, and my time there kindled an interest in Mayan and Aztec poetry and mythology that landed somewhere in the valley between preoccupation and obsession.

When I came back to Minneapolis, a year later I was designing a new class at the independent school where I teach, where the idea was to put a lot of myths in conversation with one another—and I was excited at the prospect of teaching The Popol Vuh alongside Gilgamesh, given that both texts revolve around hero-twin relationships and both involve epic confrontations with the world of death. The problem, though, was that I couldn’t find a translation of the Popol Vuh that wasn’t overtly scholarly to place alongside books like Heaney’s Beowulf, Stephen Mitchell’s Gilgamesh, or Charles Martin’s translation of Ovid, vivid poems that can be read, first and foremost, as the rattling good stories that they are by my 17 and 18 year-old students.

So, I set about fiddling with translating bits of it on my own. When I was in Mexico, I’d gotten in the habit of translating Neruda to help familiarize me with Spanish, which turned out to be quite fun, actually. I’d do twenty lines and then compare my version to others and see where I’d gone wrong. It was kind of like building a clumsy horse out of wood and then taking it to a field of gazelles. I know this is almost incomprehensibly nerdy, but I found it a bit addictive. Translation can be a kind of drug.

With The Popol Vuh, which is written in K’iche’ Maya, I needed an immense amount of help to get started, and I researched and read an awful lot. I went at it in bits and pieces, received a grant to travel down to the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala to study and listen, and eventually even took an unpaid leave from my job to finish it. I couldn’t have done it without Allen Christenson’s transliteration, which served as a scaffold for my work. I was inspired to approach the task as a poet and a reader, and my goal was to create a translucent version that sang in its own right, that was true to the original, something one of my students could read while lying in a hammock without endlessly delving into footnotes.

CL: Footnotes would definitely waste our lives! And it is a rattlingly good story, one with play and horror, transformations and reincarnations, poetic justice and anaphoral fate, and also an emphasis on language and its ability to create. Given that this verse version is a translation of a transcription of an oral tradition, how did you balance the telling of the story with the language of it? What do you see as the overlapping territory of poem and myth?

MB: The narrative is so propulsive and ingeniously constructed, the telling of the story unfolds pretty naturally—I particularly like the myth’s tendency to occasionally shift into present tense in key moments, almost as if it’s narrating a cinematic moment that’s currently unfolding. Given that, I just tried to make the language as clear and transparent as possible, striking a balance between the elevation and earthiness in the work, with a focus on loose three and four beat lines to keep it moving. The chiastic structures and repetitions create a strong sense of cadence. I also gravitated toward pre-Norman conquest English whenever possible—those muscular consonants do a better job of echoing the Kiche’ while simultaneously signaling to our ears that we are listening to something old and elemental.

I think of myths as stories that we inhabit as humans, often unwittingly or in an unexamined way, and thus we reenact them upon the world. Poetry, to me, is about simultaneously recognizing and echoing elements of those eternal narratives—but in fresh and arresting ways where the language has been somehow reawakened, allowing us to see old truths with new and wondering eyes.

CL: Wow, I don’t think I’ve heard it articulated that way—myth as story we inhabit unwittingly—and I’m fascinated by the idea. I’m thinking that poetry, on the other hand, may be one of the most explicitly conscious modes since it makes itself known and demands our attention, if only for its fleeting moment. The ‘reenacting’ seems like a place where they would align though, since every iteration is a variation on a theme, whether it presents that way to us or not.

I’ve often mulled over the directive to “make it new,” unsure which of the three words is hardest to pin down. The creation aspect of ‘make’? The ‘it,’ (or the word?!) or ‘new’? In your own poems ‘new’ seems crucial, and maybe a misnomer. “Other People” for example, begins with the familiar phrase we “should start seeing other people” and continues:

suddenly there they were,

absentminded in their mismatched clothes, all around us,
the people we had been unable to see until that point

because we had been so involved in seeing one another.
But then your words conjured them from the very air,

these other people we so clearly needed to begin seeing
if we didn’t want to keep fooling ourselves, which was

another phrase you used, and I suddenly understood
why I sometimes felt oddly wooden, like a poorly hinged

door when I leaned in to kiss you—it had to be that
elderly woman with the permanently puckered mouth

and cardigan laced with cat hair who stood like a shadow
behind your right shoulder,…”

ending with a no-longer-alone-ness, from this new world of company. So many pieces take the familiar, make it bizarre, and result in new-knowing, often one that confirms what I didn’t know I knew. How do you think about disorientation when drafting poems?

MB: That it “confirms what you didn’t know you knew” makes me so happy! Because I think the truth is actually in the language. Words carry their histories, and so I’m not sure the poems and the language take the familiar and make it bizarre as much as they take the familiar and discover that it’s always held something a little wondrous, a little strange. It helps to remember that the word familiar has family residing within it. Or recall the word currency is cousin to current because it’s meant to flow…. Or, riffing on the poem above, we might think we say “It’s not you, it’s me” as the classic break-up line because it lets the other person off the hook, but that phrase is also the myth of Narcissus reduced to six words. If we do a double-take, the words are invariably saying much more than we think. Most of the time, we’re not very good at listening to ourselves.

That’s where the disorientation comes from, I guess. The swerve. Even really basic phrases were once metaphor, as is language itself. When we refer to a table leg, it doesn’t call it to mind as an organic thing, as a limb, but that sense is in there, and if we’re suddenly offered the image of a herd of tables grazing in the meadow on their slender legs, well… …there it is.

CL: “Language is not / human invention // but an extension / of evolution // flowing from the throat. // Thoughts rise / like antlers” I’m reminded, and take on a life of their own! I was just telling my students this the other night; but the idea that one might write to find out what one knows seemed foreign. Especially since we live in an age where language has become less of a living being and more of a tool to achieve any number of things. That language might teach us or remember us or betray us—as I heard Carl Phillips say recently—seems disarming at best, and potentially frightening.

One of your pieces, “At Half-Island,” haunts me; in it a speaker watches men pull a dying orca from the water. The poem proceeds “maybe it is already / too late to talk / about appetite // or how we live / with rock and water / yet listen to neither // or how we cannot recognize / ourselves when delivered / to ourselves through signs.” Listening to ourselves, or listening to the language channeled through ourselves, demands a little humility, right? Or at least the admission that we don’t know ourselves like we think we do? This seems to be a key concern of yours, and so I’m curious what sorts of inquiries you make when writing. Would you characterize the poems themselves as questions, responses, or dialogues?

MB: I love how you reframe “listening to ourselves” as “listening to the language channeled through ourselves,” because I really think that we are as much a function and creation of language as we are conveyors and crafters of it. It’s a dance, we create stories and the stories create us in a twin-spiraled double-helix. And yes, it can be humbling to consider that, especially when transposed with our over-hyped contemporary notions about individual agency. We might be the sum of a lot of choices, but I suspect a good many of them aren’t actually made by us.

So I guess I would say I view the poems as questions I’m learning how to ask, questions in dialogue with what I’m reading and thinking, and what the world is throwing my way, elusive yearnings that I follow and try to snare in words. I don’t mean that to sound grandiose; it’s something everybody does every day. Thought and intention and feeling and mood are slippery, and words fail us all the time. Poets just make the perverse and possibly beautiful choice to make a life out of that failure. And, of course, silence is important too in that equation. What is taken away and what remains unsaid is what poems are actually made of…

CL: I’m glad you mentioned silence here, because you deal in the unsaid. So often I read your poems and have the sense that something’s not so much missing as held back—that, as an earlier piece “Unspoken” says, there are “the nerves wired under the words.” I can intuit a current running just beyond my grasp. When finishing a draft of a poem, how do you tell the difference between a silence of lack and one that’s electric? How does silence dovetail with intimacy? Are there certain things that intimacy in a poem prevents? Affords?

MB: Charles Simic said “the highest levels of consciousness are wordless.” I love that quote. Words are not boxes that hold an essence. They’re symbols standing in for something infinitely more complex. And language itself is metaphor, every poem’s an act of translation, it can only point toward what it means, with its tiny little hands… And how intimate is that? My favorite silences in poems are the ones that open into a space for the reader to inhabit, the nave of the cathedral that allows the choir of the imagination to soar. All poems need readers to complete them, of course, but great poems draw us outside of ourselves, make us bigger than we are….

CL: We forget that, don’t we? That the sheer act of speaking is a metaphor, bearing across the chasm of me and you, or me and the unsayable. And this happens even when we’re being literal! I’ve noticed a number of the strangenesses in your own poems come from reverse figures of sorts—operating almost by translation, actually—where something figurative then gets embodied. For example if one feels “like” one has no voice, a Bazzett poem turns that into “The Man with No Mouth”:

…only the skin of my chin
curving up into the twin caverns of a mundane
nose with an uninterrupted blankness beneath.

It is a form of erasure, I’d say, if I could say
anything…

While language has the opportunity to act as that connection, it also can be weaponized, or co-opted through abstraction. Can you speak to the relationship between the concrete and the imagination? Is this sort of re-membering an explicit goal as you write?

MB: Ha! Busted. And “if one feels vulnerable, then the speaker is standing naked in public and it’s mistaken for performance art.” That move, where something figurative gets embodied, is something I simply love. Like, in my belly and bones. It still excites me, on a certain level—and I don’t fully understand why—walking the wrong way down the metaphor street. But it is very much about taking the spirit, the spark, the soul of the idea and giving it a pair of actual shoes, corduroys, and a flannel shirt. Maybe I’m reversing my Catholic upbringing, on some level? After a childhood of being marinated in the notion that the physical world is not the real one, that a glinting eternal world lies beyond this flawed and clumsy material one—well, maybe my instinct as a poet is to reach into that ineffable realm and pull things back into this one, and mundane them up a bit.

That meaning of re-membering, of making something bodily whole, was certainly front and center in my mind in my first book, You Must Remember This.

CL: Mundane-ing it up results in anything but! I hadn’t thought of it this way, but translating a myth, too, re-figures for a different audience. Is remembering the same as not forgetting? And what considerations did you make when rendering the figurative and literal, or figurative as literal in The Popol Vuh?

MB: Well, given how its etymology places it in opposition to “dismembering,” I hear “remembering” as a putting back together of something, something once alive, something torn apart by time. Or violence. It’s a word that has healing in it, that’s a reversal of that history. I guess in that sense, “Not forgetting” means holding the thing together, not allowing it to come apart in the first place… …and there are certainly some things we should “never forget.” But there is a white-knuckled energy in those words that nonetheless makes me nervous.

I think that’s why I prefer the idea of old myths being remembered as opposed to never being forgotten. It allows them to be remade, reborn, resuscitated, newly alive—that was certainly the idea of re-poeming The Popol Vuh into verse in English, in any case. There’s a wonderful physicality & earthiness to the myth I was very drawn to as a reader and listener, and I love the fact that the creation of humanity takes a few drafts, that we’re a product of divine revision. The notion that even gods learn from their mistakes strikes me as an idea that could prove very useful in today’s world.

CL: Oh, I love that idea too—every day I wake it’s largely because of the belief that we can be new people, that I can do so revised. And the physical elements of The Popol Vuh seem so rich—even the kik’ ball they must keep aloft, named for tree sap and also denoting blood or vital fluid, highlights the conflation between spirit and body.

In your translation and your own poems too, one can’t escape the way we are material and material in common with creatures of the world—everything from Chuang Tzu “dreaming he was a butterfly / dreaming he was a man / like two mirrors / hung on opposite walls / facing one another / in endless hunger” to the “purest deepest / blackness” the speaker sleeps in where “moles // are slow comets / with tiny pink hands—”or the “bronchial architecture of our breath / [holding] the memory of trees” enters your pieces. Why do flora and fauna feature in so many poems? What does the touchstone of non-human allow for in a complicated and often uncomfortable interrogation?

MB: That a great question—and clearly another one of my obsessions… I think that natural/animal world features so prominently because the line between where we end, and the rest of the world begins, is pretty damned indeterminate once you begin to examine it. Our vascular system shares its DNA with the cellulose in most plant life. When indigenous peoples talk about the trees being our elders & ancestors, it’s not a metaphor. At the end of the day, we’re animals. Almost all the lines humans have used to distinguish between ourselves and other creatures have been blurred (or determined arbitrary) as our understanding of our cousins has deepened; animals live rich emotional lives, possess language, engage in ritual behavior around death, create social hierarchies to serve the collective organism, demonstrate empathy and monogamy. Bonobos even roast marshmallows. (Google it.)

At the end of the day, I think we’d best embrace the verb in our name: we’re human beings. Humans being. Being human is a state one inhabits. It’s relational. And as such, it’s hugely driven by biological urge, necessity, and code, because we’re social primates that evolved to live in groups. We don’t always like to look at that squarely, sometimes preferring words such as fate or destiny. But I think it’s mostly just biology, in the end. We’re clever apes that go to the moon. And also make other apes into lampshades. I think the one thing that might actually set us apart from other animals is our ability to live inside of narrative, our ability to invoke and inhabit symbolic frameworks (i.e. mythology, economy, ideology) that can become more real than the natural world. This can occasionally be beautiful. But we mostly do so at our peril.

CL: Peril plays large in your poetry, or less direly put—the stakes seem, if humorous, high. I think of your poem “Okay,” which I’ve included in full here:

Let’s kill everyone, they said. Okay, said the boy.

Let’s make it clean, they said. Like the outside
of an egg. Okay, said the boy. We’ll give you
the haircut now. And this neckerchief. Here’s
the salute. Okay, said the boy. We’ll make

the whole enterprise smell of mint and sell it
in embossed tins. Mmmm, said the boy,
I love mint. Yes, they said. Of course you do.

Maybe this strikes me because of our moment, because acquiescence seems dangerous, or because I teach business students who market and manage data, but—how do both humor and a casual tone allow for poems to teach us? Do you think of your work as critique or commentary? What strategies in your poetic toolkit allow you to use its framework to say what you mightn’t (as effectively) otherwise?

MB: I’m glad it strikes you because of our moment, because that’s directly where it’s coming from… What is being done to this country right now—where words are mutilated, torn from their meaning, used to mask atrocities—is a profound form of violence. And profound violence results not just in pain—which many are feeling—but also shock, anxiety and numbness, which is what power wants to perpetuate its hold.

Ruining language in this way divorces a conscience from its ability to express itself, to cry out with accuracy and precision. I think that’s why many people, particularly young people, are turning to poetry in greater numbers. Calling things what they are has always been a radical political act, but when facts become negotiable, truth lies elsewhere.

This all makes me think of something I heard Seamus Heaney say in a visit to Minneapolis, the year before he died. After he read, during the Q&A, someone asked him if he could describe good poetry in just three words. The question elicited a groan from the audience, but he took it perfectly seriously, choosing to work within the confines of the form provided. And after a moment of thinking he said, “Exact. Truthful. Melodious.”

I’ve never forgotten that. Poetry that announces itself, particularly in terms of rarefied diction, is rarely my cup of tea. And work that is overly direct often struggles to tell the complete truth. That’s why I sometimes invoke a casual tone, to sneak up on the reader a little bit, to make friends before the slicing the world open and checking for worms in the rind. Sometimes it’s droll, sometimes more deadpan. And humor is, of course, the primary tool our psyche uses to keep from going insane. If life is a joke, it’s better to laugh.

CL: Exact, truthful, melodious. Wow, what a definition. And I can completely see this strategy in your poems—laughing to keep from crying—besides, even if the rind has worms, there might well be fruit to salvage! Were you to (or maybe when you do, given your students) meet someone who had never encountered a poem before, what one would you give her?

MB: Yesterday it might have been “Tired” by Langston Hughes, or “A Blessing,” by James Wright. Today it’s definitely Dickinson’s “The brain is wider than the sky…” Tomorrow it might be “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa. Next week, who knows?