Patrick Rosal is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has been a featured performer internationally in Greece, South Africa, the UK and at hundreds of spaces in the Caribbean, South America, the Philippines, and the U.S. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Fulbright Core Research Program. He is working on a new collection of poems, The Last Thing, a collection of essays, a book-length exploration of the intersecting histories of African Americans and Filipinos, and various art projects, public and hidden. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: When I think of a Pat Rosal poem, I almost always think lyric or often song, but occasionally slip and say track, since your poems jive, shimmy, riff, echo, all-out slay me with sound. To begin, would you mind sharing some about the relationship between music and language in your work? People often say poems are “musical,” but is that a good description?

PR: First, thanks for this opportunity to chat with you! I’m so grateful you’ve spent time with my work and you have such kind things to say. And what a difficult first question. I’m always happy to talk about music, but I have as many questions as I do recollections and ideas. I was a musician and a dancer before I had any idea I could be a writer. It’s interesting. The older I get the more I wonder if I’m really a writer exactly or just someone who has a lot of curiosities but has simply had the most opportunity to explore those curiosities through language. That’s what a writer is, right? But music connected me to other people first, to my own parents who were born in another country, to friends of different backgrounds, to strangers on dance floors. And I think that’s the biggest thing for me, the physical feeling of music. I still love to dance, especially as my body is changing, getting older. As a writer—on the page and out loud—I’m after the music that moves me. I want something. And the language wants something too! It’s the collaboration of those desires at the heart of my process. The music and I (the sound of an essay or poem and I)—we’re trying to figure something out together. The language tells me what it wants through its music.

CL: If I had any sort of pitch I’d be making music instead of poems, ha! This interrogation has to be bodily, right? I always think of the lines from one of your early kundimans: “She is the good / bite— / the one whose touch / [like the numb / rush / of a drug / to your vein] will /break / your heart / in whole.” In conjunction with the lineation, the note we land on at the end there is both unexpected and completely obvious. Or not unlike the townspeople in “Bienvenida: Santo Tomas,” I “hear the news by music, / the bottles, the banging, the laughter / inside the slaughter.” And so I wonder, in that collaboration or listening to what language wants, do you ever get led astray? Can music lead you to say something that is untrue? What role does truth-telling have fulfilling those desires?

PR: That’s such a difficult question to answer with any certainty. I guess there is a lot of artwork in the world that is untrue, but honest. Some lies — fiction, fable, myth, for example — can reveal kinds of truth. I guess I think of music not so much as a fixed artifact, but as a process that is supposed to lead me astray. And I love that word—astray—whose etymology is associated with a riderless horse; a beast with no master, a creature that roams outside of the order of roads. I don’t think we can think of poems or art strictly as mechanisms of orientation without accepting their disorienting function. Our desire to be lost is as natural as the desire to have one’s bearings, and music can serve both functions; that is, it can lead us toward the familiar but also be a vehicle of estrangement. I hope I’m not dodging your question about the “untrue.” I guess I trust this movement between the familiar and the strange more than I trust some fixed idea of the truth.

CL: Not dodging at all—maybe pushing toward a more precise meaning of ‘true,’ or pointing out that when we say ‘truth’ we don’t mean an overarching one, but an honesty, a sincerity. In this sense it seems the true poem would have us dancing with an assassin-cousin beneath the tamarind tree, delivering the punch, stealing the Halloween candy, mixing records, making love, or “sing[ing] just to figure out / what we cannot say.” You’ve got me thinking of Rebecca Solnit when she writes that “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” What is it about music that allows you to walk that tightrope of the familiar and the strange? How does it keep you fully present? Do you ever write poems as escape?

PR: Imagine listening to the heartbeat of a blue whale, which averages around 10 beats per minute, and the heartbeat of a human, which is probably around 70 beats per minute, at the same time, how the two pulses don’t line up exactly, how they begin together but then depart and come close again. There’s this set of videos with the great master Ewe drummer CK Ledzekpo talking about crossrhythms and polyrhythms—two or more metrical pulses happening simultaneously, like the example I gave about listening to the heartbeat of a whale and human at the same time. Ledzekpo reminds us that life is hard with so many competing demands, and the Ewe musical traditions offer a metaphor for managing many rhythms and many tensions and energies that don’t seem to belong to one another, how they can come together with incredible complexity and variation. Rhythm is repetition is pattern is memory is matrix out of which embellishments, detours, and estrangements can manifest. I don’t know how music allows me to do that (and I don’t always walk that tightrope well at all), but I know that music does give me access to feeling.

Music also requires listening. I remember being down in Nicaragua a couple years ago and I was waiting for a poetry reading to start in a courtyard. I was listening to all these bird and lizard sounds that we don’t have in the U.S. Northeast, and I heard this asymmetrical pattern that was a lot like the Afro-Caribbean clave. And I said to myself, of course! Our ancestors had a sonic relationship to the land too! — a relationship that we don’t have much at all now and certainly aren’t encouraged to cultivate. And now when I go on hikes closer to home I can hear rhythmic patterns like this among the wildlife as well as little variations. I must seem really mad saying all of this. But on a hike last fall, my girlfriend and I were tapping and clapping out this 12/8 bell pattern and it was almost like the birds and squirrels and beetles were joining in. They were never off beat! That is also the genius of African diasporic music—its ability to accommodate infinite variations. Look, I’m straying now! haha! In short, I think of music as a practice of being present, of attuning oneself to an internal rhythm and finding its correspondence in the world around you. And if you’re lucky, when you’re completely present with the music, you can get lost in the most wonderful ways. Maybe that’s not so much escape as it is a “temporary stay” as Frost called it.

CL: It’s so interesting you say this. I think my primary goal in life is to mind. It seems like the majority of our hurts—personally and communally, nationally, globally—stem from a lack of mindfulness, or are exacerbated by it. And one of the reasons I put so much stock in poems—because they teach us this practice, of minding. When I hear ‘stay’ though, or when people think of mindfulness, it seems like a static thing. And it is, in a way, to give attention, but like you mention with African music accommodating variations, this is dynamic.

When a sound disappears and reappears or modulates, the song gets more complex than the lyric lone-note and so I wonder about orchestration. Your poems have grown longer, and you have coordinated increasingly complex beats— “Brooklyn Antediluvian,” for example, combines those of history, of personal narrative from Brooklyn and the Philippines, of race and gentrification, youth and the consequences of naming—yet without telling a single through-thread story. How does narrative come into play for you, either as something you re-mix, or resist? How has the ‘stay’ of shorter earlier poems changed, with newer longer ones?

PR: I grew up with such amazing storytellers. My brother Anthony is a great storyteller, all my cousins who grew up in Balacad and Hawaii, the many family friends and relatives who visited our house were various storytellers, musicians, liars, etc. Story is a way to relate. What we understand as narrative conventions, to me, are tools to orient the poem (or essay or story). We think of lyric as wildness, as a disorienting feature of speech, something approaching pure feeling, almost languageless itself (though—paradoxically—language carries the lyric impulse). I love both those modes. I love good storytelling and I still aspire to be a good storyteller and I love beautiful singing. Rarely in art do they happen fully and equally at the same time. More often than not, we move between story and song. And rarely is one absent from the other. There’s always a little bit of story embedded in song and some singing in the best stories. So all the play and howling and aria-esque growling and smashing and breaking and intricate fractures of lyric bear both the failure of narrative and its potential. The lyric can reveal an informal order and the narrative can reveal a formal lostness.

I’m often going back to John Coltrane just as a fan. I’m sure I learned so much about statement and variation and departure and return from his music. It’s just a lot of fun to take all these pieces of memory and history and research and dream, and, yes, let them orchestrate themselves, some of which make story sense, some of which make lyric sense. Coltrane, among other improvisational artists, has the gift and skill to be so open at any given moment that any idea or motif might enter during the process. You have to relinquish control and that’s terrifying. You might say or play something ugly or violent or painful. But the other part of this skill is the ability, I think, to very swiftly step back from this intrusion, this ghost, outcast fragment and begin to explore how it actually fits into this composition. It’s opening all the doors and windows of this house and letting it all fly in—the birds, the trash, the bugs, the vagrants, the beauty queens, the saints, the yo-yos, the murderers and the murdered. And having enough wits to find a place for them. It’s a dynamic, associative process. You have to train yourself toward it. I’m still working at it.

CL: The idea of relinquishing control seems counterintuitive, since the page is one of the only places where a writer can call the shots. At the same time, I know that some of the best things I’ve written have come when I was in a place of desperation and basically praying. Or when I was playing. Or when I thought I’d made a mistake. In baseball, often the best hitters are the ones who can capitalize on mistakes—theirs or those of opposing teams and pitchers—and so I wonder I wonder how you’ve trained yourself to react to the ugly, violent, painful, what seems like a mistake, etc.? Can you maybe share a poem of yours with an ugly or painful intrusion? How did you respond, both in the poem, and then moving forward in your writing or non-writing life?

PR: I love the baseball analogy. There’s an order to the game—any game—and it makes the sport, to a certain extent, predictable. And certainly good hitters can take advantage of a pitcher mistakenly sending a flat changeup into the middle of the strike zone. I think about my youth and learning how to break. Sometimes, in a practice session, I or someone else would do something funky or weird by accident—and then we’d see if we could replicate it or connect it to something that already existed in our repertoire. Composing in language or poetry isn’t a whole lot different. It’s hard to recall a very dramatic instance of that because they often happen incrementally or in small ways. One example is in my poem “Delenda Undone” when I wrote early in a draft that my body is “a woman’s body”. This isn’t ugly to me, but I’d never said that sentence before. I have always identified as a man—or a boy when I was young—so the phrase startled me when I wrote it down. It felt like a lie or a spectacle and I think I almost took it out of the poem, but I’m made of—and from—my mother’s body. And as a part of my own ongoing reflections on masculinity and gender, the assertion (the discovery of that assertion) made sense. I’m not a woman, but my body is a woman’s body, and that complicates a good portion of the assumptions we make about the supposedly clear lines between the idea of a man and the idea of a woman. I think those instances happen a lot in my process at every stage. It can really be one of the most exciting parts of writing.

CL: Wow, yes—I can see how initially that line would take you aback, but funky or no, it is true, and also perfect in the context of the poem where the “work is trying to find the very word / rippling in [my] body,” words that are “nowhere to be found in the languages / that have conquered the lands of my ancestors.” The drawn lines (borders, or bloodlines, perhaps) make it hard to say what the body knows, and yet articulating this seems crucial; it seems crucial to not hold back. But given that poems operate by line, I want to take this chance to ask about restraint. So much of your work, overtly or implicitly, speaks to the silencers, either as comeuppance, in defiance, as granting the voice permission—and so I wonder how you think about constraints in poems? Restraint? What sort of bridle does your riderless horse wear?

PR: There are so many ways that our speech is circumscribed—by taboo, politeness, authority, shame, etc. So sometimes a poem finds its form dialectically—anti- and synthetically—with (and against) these circumscriptions. Like race. Culture and racialized rhetoric can restrict how I’m seen—sometimes violently so—or how my nieces and nephews are seen and then the poem is a way to trouble those edges. Sometimes I use formal constraints like syllabics.

About a year ago I decided to pull these congas out of storage and really learn how to play them, as best I can anyway. And it’s just been a ton of fun studying music and history this way. I say this in response to your question because my practice with the drums is a lot like how I learned to write poems. It’s a lot of opening up and playing. But there’s another aspect to it. It’s learning rhythmic cadences and phrases and learning to play them fluently enough that I can put them together (i.e. compose). Like I said, the process is a lot of play, but the play often has constraints. Even playing polyrhythms like a syncopated 6/8 pattern over a 4/4/ pulse is a kind of constraint. And yet within those constraints, within each beat of every measure, there thousands of choices one can make sonically and rhythmically.

Language works the same way. Inside of a sentence are phrases and in the phrases words and in and between the words are sounds and silences. Sometimes you make a choice and that choice is often made in relation to the rules of speech, like grammar and syntax.

I’ll say this last somewhat discrete thing about limits. I can say with conviction that I have written for people I love. Period. I have tried to make art with the intensity and intimacy of family and many kinds of beloveds. I think that’s really different than writing for publication or literary audiences—which in the end are manufactured by academia and the publishing industry. My extended family is largely not college educated; they don’t self-identify as readers; they are working class folks, many of whom don’t speak English as their first language. I’ve always said to myself that if one of my cousins or aunts or friends were compelled to listen to me read one of my poems, that they shouldn’t be bored (aghast maybe, but not bored). That is also a kind of constraint; it is a kind of pressure that shapes and fuels my work. And that constraint is based on the idea that this small, hodgepodge, utterly dear group of ordinary people, living and dead, are not unlike other people in the world—could be five, could be twenty thousand strangers. Either way my singing and listening is with and for the people I love. That my writing reaches more people than that is an incredible gift that sprouts from the first one.

CL: And it does! You’re right—writing for those you love is a sort of pressure, a formative force, for sure. In my best moments it’s my main constraint, and it’s one thing that exudes from your work and which I admire. Speaking of writing for everyday folks, if you met someone who had never encountered a poem before, what one (of yours, of someone else’s) would you give her?

PR: I like to think most of my poems are pretty accessible to people who don’t have experience with poetry. I’d say maybe “The Woman You Love Cuts Apples For You” because I think people can relate to relishing or loving something (or someone) and no one else understanding that love. I think people understand what it’s like to be brought together by the strange love of something. I’d be grateful if anybody took the time to read poems really. Like you, Cate. Really, I’m grateful to you.