Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions) and Deviants (Stephen F. Austin State University Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, Marble House Project, Artsmith Orcas Island, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon. He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University, and can be found online at www.peterklinepoetry.com.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: While poets periodically publish a book of sonnets or a book of prose poems, it’s rare to come across a collection of entirely one form, let alone a new one! At the risk of simplicity, can you begin by describing the ‘mirrorform,’ and how it came to be?

Peter Kline: I suppose I should start with the technical specs for the sake of clarity, though for me these don’t quite get at the essence of the form. The mirrorform is an eight-line poem in two stanzas of envelope rhymes (ABBA ABBA or ABBA ACCA) in which the first and last line of the poem are the same, or nearly so. The meter of the poem is some form of trimeter, usually iambic. To me, the essence of the mirrorform is absolute compression of meaning, a gemlike formal elegance, and a chiming, richly musical quality as all of those rhymes sound so close together. I hope that another of its hallmarks is versatility—while it will never be the right form for storytelling, I’ve tried to use it to explore a wide variety of subject matters, tones, and approaches, from meditation to psalm, from elegiac to ribald. The form has a songlike quality that, along with the identical repetition, puts it in the triolet family, though its two-part structure, which often creates a hinge like a volta in the white space, also might suggest a sonnet. But I hope it will finally sound and work like nothing but itself. One of my hopes in developing the form was that I could give something back to poetry, and to other poets––some shapely tool that others might use and adapt for themselves.

In one sense I stumbled on the form by accident, though in another it is the culmination of all of my work thus far as a poet. I wrote the first mirrorform as a one-off poem, mainly by instinct rather than by plan, as I was finishing my first collection of poems, Deviants. The repetition of the first line as the final line, which is so central to the mirrorform’s effect, came about that first time as a natural dictate of the subject matter rather than as a preconceived structure. And that, I thought, was that. But a few months later as I sat down at my desk, I found myself writing another one. Which led to still another one. And before I knew it, all I was writing were mirrorforms. I began to see (and, especially, to hear, if you’ll forgive my mixed metaphor) everything through this lens, and I came to know immediately when a piece of language had mirrorform potential and when, however promising a phrase might be, it was not destined for such an approach. This went on for years! Until at last I began to crave different kinds of music, and different ways of making meaning, and my orbit finally broke and I headed off to another star. Though even now I feel the tug of the mirrorform’s gravity shaping my approach to new poems.

CL: I love the idea of giving something back to poetry and I think you do—both through the form and the way different sections of the book (psalms, end-stops, monologues, studies, votives) showcase its possibilities. I’m glad you highlighted the bookend lines which are the crux to me. They don’t simply reiterate; rather those lines with ‘mirrorform potential’ remodel what we first heard. The psalm poems which begin the collection allow fundamental questions or pleas—Does it have to be just me?; Lord, let this worry break; Is there a place for me?—to reveal, but also conflate. XIX appears in its entirety below:

I’ll show you you through me
I wonder—will you be pleased?
Or sway like a man amazed
his I has been made III?

Facsimile of thee
but no true duplicate,
I was made to fade. Just wait—
I’ll show you you through me.

There is so much ontology and theology compressed in the gem here; but part of what fascinates me is the slipperiness of the speaker—initially I assume a mortal speaker addressing the divine, but the more I read it, the more the two blur and I’m unsure who’s revealed to whom. Often we describe speakers in terms of ‘voice,’ but I don’t know I could (or would want to) pin down a speaker in these pieces. How do you think about speakers in these psalms, or in mirrorforms in general? What about the form creates voice? Or is that even a consideration?

PK: Yes, voice is absolutely a consideration in the mirrorforms, and a tricky one because of the way the imperatives of the form tend to work against a feeling of natural speech. There are different schools of thought on this, but my personal aesthetic in writing formal poetry has always dictated that the language should show no strain or acrobatics in order to accommodate the form. Syntactic inversion, for example, is out of the question unless it’s called for by the speaker and context. I admire much of A.E. Stallings’ work and thinking, but this is one area of major aesthetic disagreement—again, the problem isn’t with archaicism per se, but rather with the way that in most cases archaicism breaks the unity of voice in the poem. When it does so in order to accommodate meter or rhyme, the flaw is that much more pronounced, and the spell of the poem is broken.

Another challenge in creating voice in these poems is the form’s brevity—there just isn’t much room in any single poem to allow the speaker to emerge. One way to address this second problem is through poetic sequence. In the Psalms, I imagine a consistent speaker, a consistent perspective from which divinity, mortality, faith, and longing are viewed and experienced—but that perspective is a deeply ambivalent one, so it is natural that contradictions emerge from poem to poem. We all contain multitudes, we are all at times the dummy from which the voices of others speak. The challenge is to admit that kind of inconsistency while still achieving a sense of unity—this is the soulsmanship we all engage in on a daily basis as we strive to establish coherence in our lives and personalities, here made visible in miniature on the page. My approach to voice in the Psalms is thus instinct-based, and sound-based. During the composition process, I know a false step in diction or perspective or voice because I can hear it.

The monologues are similarly voice-driven, but the difference is that the voice becomes one of the primary subjects of the poem. These poems strive to establish a worldview, personality, field of reference, conflict, and way of being all in a very few words. In writing these poems, I often felt inhabited by the voices—some of them, like “Catcaller” or “Trumpeteer,” distinctly unpleasant, or even evil—and tried to let them speak through me in a way that would most vividly reveal and enact themselves. This brings me back to the idea of storytelling that I mentioned before. The mirrorforms aren’t suited for conventional narrative (conflict-crisis-resolution) because of their extreme brevity and circular nature. But they can create an implied narrative by locating a particular voice in a particular situation with a particular problem. And in the Psalms, a narrative arc is created across the sequence with the evolution of the relationship between the speaker and the divine, and the speaker’s feeling toward himself and his faith and doubt.

Voice and form are finally collaborative in my poems—the voice shapes the expression of the form by giving each poem its unique qualities of sound and meaning-making. Similarly, the form shapes the voice by influencing what it can say and how it can say it. This may seem like heresy to an idea of poetry that equates voice with identity, but at its heart all poetry—all art—is artifice.

CL: So many of the monologues have incredible and distinct voices: the “Impetuist” who begins “It takes so fucking long!” sets up a very different tone from the “Futurist” who declares “Death was just something to do.” In the “Narcissist” though, we have a mirror within the mirrorform; this voice interests me because it might reveal something about the mechanism itself. The mirror reflection leads also to a reflection as in a ‘meditation,’ so that what begins as observation folds to aphorism at the poem’s crease, and then broadens out, to entreaty:

A different difficulty
from each day’s mirror-test
(Which way do I look best?)
might make my thoughts more pretty.

Self-study breeds self-pity
Give me the will to choose
a less exacting muse,
A different difficulty.

Even as the speaker wants a less severe muse, within that word ‘exacting’ I see the shadow of ‘exact’ and can’t help think of distorting mirrors that make you look heavier or thinner, or those hung in softer light. The less ‘exact’ mirror might provide a distortion of sorts, a changed perspective, a startling realization perhaps, which too is a different difficulty. All this leads back to your comment about art as artifice; ‘artifice’ has a connotation of cunning or subterfuge, but many of these pieces coin or incorporate genuine adages. What difficulties does a form that wears its artifice on its sleeve have? What opportunities?

PK: Yes, “artifice” can imply subterfuge, and I’m glad for that shade of meaning, as I always have hidden designs on my reader! But I had intended the word “artifice” more along the lines of its other definition, artful (that is to say, crafted) creation. What I mean is that voice isn’t a preexisting entity that finds expression in a poem; rather, the process of writing the poem makes the voice. Of course there is something that comes before—the full physical, emotional, historical, psychological, intellectual, political, linguistic, etc. life of the writer, as well as the writer’s intentions for the poem at hand, if they approach the writing that way. But these aren’t poured out as voice into a poem like water into a glass. Each act of poem-making transforms them into voice—it is an alchemy. When the qualities of a writer’s style accrue over many works, and when these sharply differentiate themselves from mainstream expression, we say that writer has a “voice.” But this is a different use of the term than the one I’ve been talking about.

To me the implication of this alchemy between the writer and the poem-making is freedom, both personal and artistic. Eliot was being slippery and evasive in the passage of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” where he argues that poetry is “an escape from personality”. But there is still some truth to it in my experience. When I’m writing a poem—or I should say, when the writing is going well—I dissociate from myself, my ideas about myself, my desires for my work, and my thoughts and feelings about how others are perceiving me and the work. I enter fully into the poem, and lose sense of time and my surroundings. The poem becomes the mind; the mind becomes purely aesthetic. As long as I can physically maintain that state, the only imperatives are those generated by the poem itself—to be true to it, and follow where it leads. So there’s freedom in the writing, and freedom in the product.

But why write like this? Why write in such a non-intentional (and therefore disempowering, and slow!) way? In my experience, it allows a strangeness, authenticity, intensity, and ambiguity into the work that cannot come from a more intentional approach. Much poetry today, it seems to me, is written from an intellectual or an ideological impulse—it is a vehicle for subject matter or theme. The poet writes to express an idea rather than allowing an idea to emerge from the poem. The resulting poems tend to be overdetermined, flat, lifeless, ordinary, orthodox, didactic, propagandistic, and, perhaps most of all, prosy. The most they can hope to achieve is cleverness, or graceful or ingenious conformity. I think a poem should aspire for more.

All this may sound strange since, as you note, my work sometimes has an adage-like, epigrammatic quality, and the epigram is a form that is highly associated with the intellect rather than the subconscious. But a good epigram always has a quality of irrationality. James Richardson’s best aphorisms are exemplary of this, as are those of J.V. Cunningham. Part of this is in the music and other non-semantic qualities of language—it takes more than a good idea to make an epigram; the language must somehow perfectly and memorably embody that idea. Part of this is in the epigram’s deliberate ellipsis—it must mean much more than it states. Part of this is in its frequent courting of paradox and irony. A good epigram finds a way to express what we don’t know that we know.

CL: Yes, the poem is more than the sum of its words, for sure. For me at least, a good poem is magnetic just as living things are; in both instances I’m drawn to what I cannot grasp, what I do not know. The inability to be lost inside paradox or mystery or ambiguity, saddens me; at the same time, I often find myself reading for or writing toward clarity. What is the trade off? What would productive ambiguity look like? Perhaps you can address this in light of some of the “end-stop” poems?

PK: To me, ambiguity in a poem is productive when it has been carefully framed to limit possibilities, and when those possibilities are compelling. If a poem can mean anything, it means nothing. And when the difference between possible meanings is inconsequential, the ambiguity is just a distraction. There are probably infinite ways that productive ambiguity can occur in a poem, but I’ll focus on two that I use in Mirrorforms.

The first ambiguity that interests me is tonal. In such a case, the subject matter is clear, but the attitude of the poet toward the subject matter is uncertain. The effect of this is often an unsettling moral ambiguity—many of the monologues from Mirrorforms operate this way. In my poem “Futurist,” for example, I try to capture a mindset widespread around my part of the country—you live there as well, Cate, so perhaps you’re aware of it!—of a hubristic worship of technology and wealth. This is a mindset I personally find abhorrent. But it is my hope in the poem to simply capture it, and force the reader to make decisions about its moral implications. This technique has some kinship with Chekhov’s famous dictum: “When you want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder.” His advice suggests a deliberate obscuring of the author’s natural emotional relationship to the material in order to achieve an effect. Chekhov uses it, masterfully, to generate sympathy. I’m interested in exploring other possible emotional effects in addition to this one—discomfort, revulsion, danger.

In many of the “end-stops” of Mirrorforms, I’m developing a different kind of ambiguity, the natural ambiguity of metaphor that results from its fundamental irrationality. A metaphor states that the impossible is true; the reader must make sense of that impossibility by drawing associations between its two terms, but in an interesting metaphor there will be productive shades of difference in possible interpretations. “Double Cliché” plays with this ambiguity. The first half of the poem develops a single phrase—“Scrubbed up with the same soap”—through a series of roughly parallel metaphors. The second half of the poem, which culminates in the original phrase, is also made up of parallel metaphors, but these are of a very different meaning than those of the first half. The poem calls attention to the way that context shapes meaning. The first line is somewhat mysterious on its own, but comes into focus as it is revealed by the three lines that follow. But then this meaning is challenged by the new possibility in the poem’s second half. And none of the iterations in either half quite means the same thing, even as they point to similar meanings. So finally, the subject of the poem is ambiguity itself—the tension between definite meaning-making and irresolution, and the mind’s ability to exist between them: the rabbit-duck illusion, in poem form.

CL: When I think of productive ambiguities, I think of lines I want to keep turning over once I’ve left the page—those I want to learn by heart so as to keep w(ringing) them out. You’re right—there are so many types, and the two you mention both seem to hinge on juxtaposition and a cultural self-awareness. I don’t bring her up just because of brevity or meter, but Dickinson also deals in productive ambiguity, maybe more through abstraction and fragmentation. How (did) Dickinson’s sensibilities influence the mirrorform(s)? And unlike in her poems, titles do such key framing work in yours. How do you think about titling, and a title’s function?

PK: (W)ringing out! What a fantastic term for it, and what an apt way to capture the experience of reading Dickinson’s work, with its finely tuned musical sense, its haunting memorability, and its capacity to always yield further droplets of meaning. Dickinson is a model for the mirrorforms in all of these respects. Her influence can be felt throughout the book, but the Studies section is most directly in conversation with her. Several of the poems in that section are inspired by Dickinson’s “definition” poems, which, in her work as in mine, seek to make their ideas vivid but also strange and unresolvable. Dickinson’s “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” for example, begins with a striking, near-sentimental metaphor for hope. But by the end of the poem, she has followed the logic of the metaphor into disconcerting territory where we’re driven to contemplate our moral relationship with and obligation to our own emotional states. When Dickinson asks what something is, she always ends up considering who and what we are. These questions seem inseparable to me also.

Many of my favorite Dickinson poems investigate an acute but difficult to identify emotional and psychological state—I think of her masterpiece, “There is a certain slant of light.” This also is a kind of definition poem, though it defines something so fleeting and subjective that we have no name for it. My poem “Cognitive Science” has a similar project. “Cognitive Science” seeks to define the strategies and tendencies of the human mind when it takes on an impossible task—that is, to know the experience of its own death. Because such knowledge is beyond human capabilities, and is also utterly terrifying, we tend to make it visible, if we dare to look at it at all, by cloaking it in abstraction or speculation or hope or fear. Yet the thing itself remains.

The method of titling in Mirrorforms varied widely by individual poems or kinds of poem. I understood almost immediately that I was writing a sequence of psalms in the tradition of the Biblical Psalms, Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” and Maurice Manning’s psalm-like “Bucolics.” I used the title “Psalms” to connect to that tradition because I felt my psalms emerged from a similar impulse, even though mine are far more fraught and agnostic in their approach to the divine. In that sense, they are both staking a claim to the tradition and altering it, as they challenge the idea of what a psalm is and what kind of relationship with the divine it should properly encompass. With the Monologues, titles tended to emerge during the writing process as my own understanding of the speaker emerged. These titles made it possible for me to shape the poem with the benefit of the context they provided. The speaker in “Catcaller,” for example, is so full of rage and shame that he hardly dares to reveal himself and tends to speak in code, making the title a crucial entry point for the reader. In many of the mirrorforms, though, the titles came last, sometimes not until I began assembling the manuscript. The titles of the Studies, for instance, were all chosen after they were written, and are deliberately oblique. In most cases, these titles are drawn from the metaphorical system in the poem rather than the actual topic—in other words, they seem mismatched with the poem’s material. I did so in part just to be playful—another thing I love about Dickinson’s work!—and in part to emphasize what is perhaps an obvious point: the terms of a study are inextricable from the object of that study. In other words, how we know something, and the language in which we know it, becomes part of the thing we know.

CL: That’s a hard (but crucial!) thing about poems that trips people up, I think: that the language is what we know, that the way is the thing itself. In terms of language, yours really runs the gamut; we have everything from lines like “your ripchord smile is myth” or “If not me, Lord, then who?” to “waggles your thingamajig,” “the . in Kink.com,” or “Subdivide and conquer!” If language is what we know, what does the mirrorforms’ lexicon say about its knowledge? And if not in the writing of them, perhaps now, in hindsight?

PK: As you say, diction is a signifier of knowledge, so it is always highly specific to the speaker. The End-Stop poems of Mirrorforms are collage explorations of contemporary language and culture, and so speak in a way that is quite distinct from, say, the more traditional lyric approach of some of the Votives. The range of diction across my poems is thus a product of the variety of perspectives and kinds of utterance they take on. I think poems can—and should—shout, whisper, growl, brag, seduce, threaten, disclose, flatter, accuse, lament, inform. Each of these approaches requires a different vocabulary. That said, of course my speakers can’t know anything I don’t know, though they sometimes know less, and often know it differently.

Diction has always seemed to me to be one of the primary sources of delight in a poem. I think of Stevens, who had a gift for saving his verbal bling for just the right occasion: “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.” There is certainly an aesthetic question here, and a question of intended audience, as diction in Stevens can also seem ostentatious and undemocratic. But personally, I love strange words, and keep lists of them as I encounter them in the hope that they might someday announce themselves as just the right word for an utterance.

My general principle of diction, though, is that the words themselves need not be unusual, but they absolutely need to piece the world together in unusual ways. A mousy, ordinary word applied in an unexpected but perfectly apt circumstance is often the most effective approach. The ability to consistently combine surprise and rightness in diction is a kind of genius, and is a clear differentiator of literary quality. It is a sign that the poet is fully awake—there are no automatic formulations slipping in to the work. We feel the writer meeting the challenge of freshly putting the world into language at every instant.

What I distrust most are poeticisms and cant, as these are both a form of groupthink and erode the individuality of speaker and perspective (unless cant and groupthink become the subject of the work itself, as in some of Randall Mann’s razor-edged poems on corporate culture). I’m certainly vulnerable to it myself—I remember going through my MFA manuscript crossing out the word “dark,” which I realized I had been using as a form of lazy emotional shorthand. Ironically, in many corners of contemporary poetry the presence of cliched poetic words, images, and ideas are a sine qua non for poetry itself—I regard them with a deep wariness. But diction is always wrapped up with usage. There are very few words that poetic clichés have so ruined that they are beyond rehabilitation.

CL: I love that—the mousy word “freshly putting the world into language.” If you were to meet someone who had never experienced poems before, or perhaps only those steeped in poeticisms, what first piece would you share?

PK: Ah, a tricky question. One reason that I conceive my work in relation to specific poetic traditions is because these provide a reference point and potential foothold for readers, as well as, often, grounds for me to assert contrast and rebuttal. And some of the poems in Mirrorforms are more approachable than others in terms of meeting traditional poetic expectations. But I think there’s often a benefit in being thrown into the deep end! A decade or so ago I read Frederick Seidel’s Ooga-Booga for the first time, and thought, “My god! Can you say that? Can a poem do that?” The experience, for me, was of a shocked and wicked delight. I was disgusted; I was hooked. I’d love to create a similar experience in a reader, delight and danger, seriousness and play, surprise and uncomfortable recognition, all deliciously intertwined. I think “The Living Dead” is the poem I’ve written that’s most in that spirit of Seidel, minus the Ducatis.

CL: “Flying toward that nation” where all is deliciously intertwined. Thank you again, Peter!