Sam Ross is the author of Company, selected by Carl Phillips for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: An interesting thing about your first collection, Company, is that the poems feel so intimate, so close, and yet reveal little. I think of the poem “Time Expanding the Air Forcibly,” which reads: “…I showed you a picture I took / that day using the camera that leaks light / in a way that makes me want to cry, / makes me want to move to Mt. Fuji and paint / my life onto 8×10 transparencies. / About the picture, you said that’s how it felt, / but not how it looked. How could that be?”

In an age of tell-all but maybe not entirely truthful media, how do you go about creating moments of connection? What level of transparency do poems require, or is there a certain necessary leaked light, a sort of diffraction or deflection?

SR: Could you tell me a little bit about what you mean when you say the poems reveal little? I want to unpack that to be sure I’m understanding your premise correctly.

CL: Okay thanks for asking—you’re pushing me to better articulate what I love, which is hard. I guess by “reveal little” I mean provide relatively few details about the speaker/poet and occasion. Although it has such personal, intimate moments, Company does not operate in a ‘this is my life story’ sort of way that so many first books, especially contemporary ones, do. I mean, we have what’s essential—but it feels like a play where the curtain opens on two chairs and a table, but not a full blown set. And then all the magic is in the dialogue, in how the two people sit and stand and interact at that table. Does this make any sort of sense?

SR: Absolutely. I’ve been turning over the idea of what we think we reveal in poems and what a reader ends up finding there for a long time. When I turned in this book, I felt a sense of vulnerability, but the poems aren’t telling a life story. In fact, I think the poems view story with suspicion: story as a way of tying up too neatly the loose ends, story as an attempt to reconcile what remains unreconcilable. Of course poems have arisen from events in my life and the images I find there, but they are subject to a brutal process of transformation. Ellen Bryant Voigt writes, “The point is not to prohibit the personal, but to examine it with utter ruthlessness. And resist any temptation to use the poem to make its readers like you, or admire you, or forgive you.” I almost fell out of my chair when I read that. (I’m always looking for forgiveness). But I am interested in intimacy, and I am interested in closeness—as experience, as subject, as a matter of form. How do you create it? Diffraction, as you say? Deflection? Maybe! One way to think about intimacy is as a measure of the distance between ourselves and the world, or “the space between,” as Stacey D’Erasmo calls it in The Art of Intimacy. To understand closeness, you have to chart distance, or even create it. To me, that absolutely looks like two chairs and a table. Give me Caryl Churchill all day. Give me Love and Information.

CL: I want to come back to forgiveness, but the idea of writing to be liked or admired is such a dangerous road—a phenomenon only been exacerbated by a culture of “likes.” I often forget it’s “tell all the truth but tell it slant,” according to Dickinson—that she does advocate for a full-reveal—which I don’t think would win me many admirers or make for good poems. But this circles round to “success in circuit,” and the paradoxical intimate distance you mention with D’Erasmo. You say as much in a poem “Sext” which at one point reads: “…do you like / to fable—I mean / danke—I mean / dance? What I like / is not knowing / what we look like / to each other.”

Some distance is desirable, some mystery. “Shibboleth” also comes to mind, a poem that meditates on the past and even personifies memory, ending:

“…There is still
a risk when waking to melting
cells of frost that each
disappearance carries me closer
to forgetting completely
what was ours. A mind dilated
as the tips of peacock feathers,
and now with no voice left
on the telephone to tell me: Yes,
that’s how I remember it too.”

In the trajectory of the poem, “forgetting completely what was ours” comes as a surprise, but places me in familiar lost-love mode for a minute, until something more interesting (more revealing? more true?) happens: the speaker mourns not the relationship, exactly, but the accompanying erasure of memory, of the past. This is just one example of deflection and so I wonder what some of your strategies are for creating non-cryptic but still productive distance? How do you find the sweet spot of slant and straight on? What does this require of (or what do you expect from) readers?

SR: The fun-to-me fact about the words fable and danke in “sext” is that those are actual iOS autocorrections—from my own clumsy fingers—working their way to the intended target—which I think gets to the heart of your question in that, for me, the sweet spot between slant and straight on is surprise. We’ve used the word deflection a few times, which made me want to look it up to be sure I had understood it correctly. Of course, I hadn’t. I had thought the nearest synonym would be something like refusal, but it’s really more like turn, which is exactly where I want to be, inside the poem’s shifts, associations, and leaps (what Robert Bly calls “long tails of dragon smoke”) to an arrival somewhere unpredicted, unintended. I think sometimes music carries you there. For me, it’s often connected to time: erasing, collapsing, defying time. I’m turned on by the idea of return, the leaving and the coming back home.

Whatever my relationship to a reader, it doesn’t rest on expectation. What is there to expect? I’m reminded of a passage in Zadie Smith’s 2011 essay “Why Write?” in which she theorizes that our times will make of writing “less of an epic boast and more of a kind of query”:

I have this feeling? Do you? I saw this thing. Can I make you see it? I had this thought—can you understand it? I am in this relation to death. Are you? I am in this relation to technology. Are you? I am in this relation to myself and the world. Are you? I am wondering whether writing is possible. Are you?

That’s what I’m after. Smith speculates that prose will “approach the condition of poetry”—so maybe we’re ahead of the curve.

CL: Now that I look back, I see nearly every poem of yours has some slippage of time, or interrogation of its fundamental uncertainty. I’ve noticed a key difference in poetic dispositions—those who think linearly (and so will insist that narrative underlies everything) and those who think more episodically, or “in the long trails of dragon smoke.” The latter makes sense to me (and often older people take this position) in that the more you know the more you don’t know, the more time you experience the more time falls away like basting threads.

In “Tableau Vivant” the speaker writes that “You can see / what I love by the way // I decide what is worth / living for. This is not / a trick—I can sense how far / we are from the end. // …What I want is you / to see the fuse alight // and in reverse. Before you / a burning pinwheel / reels back to its beginning. / Look at me.” Smith’s “are you?” echoes at every turn, and though time may bring uncertainty, the speaker wants to be witnessed, to know he is not alone. Which leads me to the collection’s title—what sort of company do these poems call into question or attempt to invite?

SR: Uncertainty is essential, but how do we express it without being facile? “I guess we can never know for sure!” strikes me as glib, an ethical copout that makes it easy to give up trying to understand things that are difficult to understand. Conversely, there’s nothing more leaden than a poem that arrives at a conclusion it already had.

The book’s title refers to several companies: to the physical company of its various intimates (the friends, lovers, and family who are addressed or otherwise appear), to the lyric company of a poetic voice (Stevens’s interior paramour, Kunitz’s deep-sea diver), and to an invisible company of the dead.

One of the subtle (to me) through lines of the book is the sense—not often acute but hovering at the margins—of a great loss that is known to the speakers but has preceded them, informing their experience in ways difficult to discern. That’s history in a nutshell, but in this case the loss is specific to the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. I’m thinking of poems like “The Opposite of Bleeding,” “Modern Medicine,” “Recommendation (Number 9),” “Curriculum,” and others. Even a poem like “Bowers v. Hardwick,” which is very much a love poem. The speakers of this book come of age at a time when a very large number of people they might easily have known are recently and, to them, perplexingly absent. What are the various ways of loving in a world like that? And has the present American moment of clockwork shootings, state violence, and murder-as-Internet-fodder made of death a different animal? How to connect? With abandon? With caution? With luck?

CL: I love how you have differentiated between these companies. I’m particularly interested in the places where the three overlap, as I think they do in some of these very pieces you mention—with Whitman and Andrew plus fish sandwiches, or the parade love poem in the shadow of such a disturbingly recent court ruling, or the inability to donate blood even as dying continues. It seems that creating the company, or all of these companies, in a poem requires a certain collapsing of time so that the speaker can enter the silent room and maximize his chance at connection, at love. You ask how, and my immediate answer is “with deliberateness.” There’s a patience and a perseverance in the lines “I would learn rare // and love and want and wait. / I had to start at the beginning.”

Where is the beginning, for you?

SR: “…the pouring in / of everything meeting, wars, dreams, winter night.” – Muriel Rukeyser

CL: In varying words, many poets say everything they are and encounter creates their poems, and when I think of Company as a whole I can see various aspects meeting: travel and service abroad, rural roots, negotiations of race and sexuality, artistic and historical influences, etc. But I’m interested in the way, for example, in “Captive Pattern” we have a used car advertisement with a chained tiger that transforms to a forest that “nets lights/ the way tigers are netted,” so the speaker can’t find his way home, and the ends at language’s inevitable trap with nightfall described as “what came/ from saying nightfall.” It’s as though the poem undergoes a phase change, but can you talk some about what happens when the everything meets? What gets poured out?

SR: Phase change—as a water sign, I love that. I think when everything meets you make your choices. This is maybe a practical question about my process of poem-making more than anything. I sometimes start with larger fields of language and work through a process of reduction, taking pieces away and tuning in to the frequencies that emerge from juxtapositions. Or else I’ll re-shape the whole field, like collapsing clay on a potter’s wheel and then building it up again: same material, different structure.

For example, I wrote “Captive Pattern” while I was living in Provincetown, where I would go for long runs from my apartment to a beach called Race Point on a route that went from the south bayside of Provincetown’s spiral-shaped peninsula to the north oceanside. I was thinking of patterns of time and life, orientation and disorientation, sadness and ending and returns, the sheer alarm of a spiraling existence (there’s hope in that concept too, but not so much in this poem—winter had hit and I was in deep). And I’d been listening to a lot of Dusty Springfield which is where that Have a Good Life Baby line comes from; it’s a song of hers (“Pretend the sun is on a rise / when the day is at an end,” she sings). And yes, there really was a tiger in some midwestern car dealer’s commercials of my childhood, and I still think about that tiger and hope it had a good life. In one of my favorite Neko Case songs, “The Tigers Have Spoken,” she sings about an animal much like that: “he walked in circles till he was crazy, and he lived that way forever.” And that brings us to Rilke’s caged panther, the same story: “It seems to him there are / a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. / As he paces in cramped circles, over and over.”

I can imagine someone reading all of the above and feeling like none of that is actually in the poem, that I’ve intentionally held things back because I want to feel smart or something. But that’s not it at all. It was a pouring out, like you said. And what’s left is a vessel.

Or as my mom would say: My glass is half full!

CL: A glass all your own. There’s a difference, I think, between withholding for the sake of withholding and withholding because something else emerges, when the seed coat slips. You have incredible self-awareness as to how things form—more than my own intuitive bumbling by sound—and the way in which others influence your own work. What musicians, writers, artists etc. hover above your pen? Who has influenced the way you come to the page?

SR: I think “intuitive bumbling by sound” is a strong contribution to a collective definition of poetry. And I agree with you about the seed coat (ha!). I also tend to think that there are perfectly good reasons to withhold. Kindness, for one. Dignity (for yourself and others). You can write out of a wound without reopening it. If that’s “for the sake of withholding,” I say do it. Just find a way to find a clarity (there are many different kinds). I think of my teacher and advisor Lucie Brock-Broido, who wrote a theory of her own desired lyric in an under-circulated essay called “Myself a Kangaroo Among the Beauties.” She writes: “That which is withheld on the page is equal in importance to that which is Held.” She also quotes Marianne Moore: “Omissions are not accidents.”

I think of Lucie often since her passing. Every day really. I miss her very much. Being in a room with her was to have the feeling of being on a threshold of great revelation, then sometimes crossing over that threshold it and seeing the Truth. I’m stealing from Kushner there, but that is how it felt. As if an awesome angel was about to crash through the ceiling at any moment. You longed to impress her, not with a parlor trick of a poem but something else, something that would mean you had made even a very small contribution to her own sense of the world. Because her sense of the world (which was also a sense of an Otherworld) mattered terribly. She was also really funny. About influences: Lucie once gave me three chances to guess her favorite visual artist. I got it on the fourth (Joseph Cornell).

I tend to think of influences in terms of inspiration rather than emulation. And when I think of 20th century greats (not including living poets), people that come to mind for me are Rukeyser, Oppen, Brooks, Hughes, Milosz, Rich, Heaney, Szymborska, Kunitz… but honestly, once I start down that path, it’s really hard to stop. I love playwrights, too. I wish I was rich so I could go to the theater all the time. Caryl Churchill, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. I was reading Martha Nussbaum when I wrote the poem “Bowers v. Hardwick.” “Pro Tem” came after Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. “Tableau Vivant” from The House of Mirth. But I don’t tend to enter writing mode after reading poems. I keep a greater distance there.

I began writing seriously after a visual arts education, and I think I have brought some of that instruction to bear on my work as writer in terms of composition, framing, structure, compression, contrast, etc. The photographers I first studied—Nan Goldin, Mary Ellen Mark, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, etc.—there’s a lyric voice inside each frame. Film is big for me and popular music and dance music are a constant background, as well. Wong Kar Wai, Chantal Ackerman, Greg Araki, Todd Haynes, Jane Campion, PJ Harvey, Hercules and Love Affair, Frankie Knuckles, R.E.M., Everything but the Girl…

I should also say that it really started for me with Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. That was huge.

CL: I love hearing people’s influences. With so many ways of being conscious in the world—I think of Terrance Hayes’ assertion that “poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument,”—they are one tool to navigate what it means to be alive. And yet language is double-edged, no? Because it can mean and distort, can elucidate and confuse. In that same Brock-Broido essay she writes “What I want is a form of Legibility…I am more & more passionate about inclusion (of the reader), less & less impassioned about exclusion, mere invention, BYOB (Bring Your Own Baggage) to the page. I’ve become more & more right-wing about Coherence…more & more drawn to the other notion that Simplicity is Clarity & Clarity is Bliss.” And yet I don’t know that the transitive property works here, or, if simplicity is bliss, fear something gets lost in the crossing over. In light of this, I’m wondering if you could elaborate on some of the types of clarity you mentioned?

SR: Oh, that’s so interesting. Well, I think that any medium is distortion. There is no stability. That’s where the fun comes from—and the urgency and the ethics. And that Brock-Broido essay is great, isn’t it? I mean, who would have dared to put “Simplicity” and “right wing” anywhere near her name? Only herself, winking.

When it comes to clarities, there’s dramatic clarity, narrative clarity, clarity of grammar, of image, of feeling… With dramatic clarity, I think of incitement and setting. In this book, it can often be a plain tendency to observation and reaction. The poem “Water Street” begins: “I saw a python.” Or in another poem a speaker can hear something, then think “What the hell?” Wherever else the poem goes (or doesn’t go) that’s the dramatic incitement. The poem is a reaction, sometimes to a space: Look, we’re in a seaside café. Oh, here’s that damn ocean again. Basic stuff—but it actually took me a long time to feel comfortable with that.

Or maybe the poem was incited, I got what I needed, and for whatever reason, I unmoor it. Or that incitement becomes sealed in a time-fold. Or the origin wasn’t dramatic but lyric—the arrival of a voice I wanted to heed—then, there are other considerations. You have to decide if the poem resounds, even in softness, in order to produce a clarity of feeling. That’s how I think of some of the Vox poems in my book, for example. Or a poem like “Struck,” which suggests but doesn’t narrate an act of violence.

I’m suspicious of overly-engineered poems. This is all theoretical, but theory is mostly a rearview mirror for me; it rarely helps me make something new, only to better understand what I’ve decided I can live with and why.

CL: I think lots of people are suspicious of poems, engineered or no. And so if you were to encounter someone who had never come across a poem before, or maybe never one beyond grade school. What poem would you share with him or her?

SR: “The White Fires of Venus” by Denis Johnson.

CL: Ah, thank you, Sam—yes. Those Andromedans who “hear your voice like distant amusement park music / converged on by ambulance sirens / and they understand everything. / They’re on your side. They forgive you.”