I’ve published 21 straight weeks of interviews with people and have eleven interviews in process, but no new one ready for today. So for those of you who don’t have time to watch an hour long video, but might be interested in reading my interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gregory Pardlo, today is your lucky day.
Bob Fenster: For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the irascible Mr. Fenster. Welcome Mr. Pardlo, may I call you Greg? [applause] I’d like to thank Greg Pardlo for coming here today. I haven’t shared this with many people, but Greg and I have known each other for many, many years… since the 90s, or was it the 80s?
Greg Pardlo: ’91.
Fenster: We went to college together, Rutgers University, and Greg, besides being a very good friend, filled a role for me that was really very important in that… When many of you go to college you’ll have conversations into the wee hours of the morning when there is no bedtime and you’ll stay up having philosophical conversations and you’ll talk to 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning. Greg and I worked on the newspaper, the Rutgers Review, together for a couple of years and we would be editing the newspaper and we’d sit out in the hall and we’d talk, and inexorably would be drawn to discussions about race in America and there would be times where I would want to ask a question and I would stop myself because I was concerned that I might say something offensive. And Greg was always very quick to assure me that: “No, you can ask me anything, I’m not going to get offended by your question. I’d rather you ask me something ignorant, and I’ll explain it to you or I’ll give you an answer, and hopefully you can do the same for me.” It made a huge difference in how I saw the world.
Half of the audience wasn’t here earlier today, but we had another guest speaker who had an open thread online of questions and comments that were posted anonymously and unfortunately there were some grossly inappropriate comments that were made, some of which that had racial overtones or should just be called racial epithets. I’m just going to throw it over to Greg. What are your thoughts here? Were you the least bit surprised by a suburban New Jersey high school sounding like an Alabama high school?
Pardlo: No no, I wasn’t surprised because I grew up in South Jersey… I didn’t make it a habit going around telling people “I’ll be your font of African-American information for the next two hours, ask me anything.” No that wasn’t something that I would just ordinarily do, I was interested in talking with Bob and he and I sat up having these conversations because I’m the first person in the family to go to college. When I got there, in the paper that he was managing editor of, they published an article about Nelson Mandela, and the headline [of an opinion piece] was that “Nelson Mandela is a seditious terrorist” and my head exploded, and I wrote a letter to the editor out of sheer rage and rant, something I had never done before. Like I said, I didn’t know anything about college, this was an entirely new environment for me, I had no one advising me at home about what to do — or you know, this really quick, my first day of school, I had scheduled all of my classes like 8 to 3… 8 in the morning, which is insane, you don’t do that and at the end of the day I went back to the room where my first class was because I thought that was my homeroom. I thought you still had homeroom in college, that’s how oblivious… I was sad, you can have pity for little Greg. And so when I send this letter off to the editor, I got a phone call from Bob saying not only would you come and write something else, but would you come write for the newspaper? And this was just incredible and very rarely, well actually you’ll hear writers say, “I credit so and so for getting me into writing” — it’s all BS — none of that is true — but in this case, I credit Bob quite a bit for my becoming a writer. It was the first time I was ever able to have conversations like that and so I wanted an environment, I wanted a relationship in which there was mutual respect, right? And I knew I had plenty of dumb things to say, plenty of dumb questions because I came from a place where, you know, we were a very insular community. We were very provincial in our thinking. So I had a lot to learn and thank goodness he had a lot to learn because that evened all out.
Now to the point of this morning. No I’m not surprised. This is us. We hear people say, you see these horrible things happening around society and they say, “This is not who we are!” Yeah, fool, yes it is, it’s exactly who we are! Yes it is. Right, and the problem is this resistance, this insistence that this is not who we are. No, when we do that all it means is “I refuse to look at this, I refuse to think about this, I refuse to process it.” And then the stuff just festers. So I am not surprised on the one hand — it’s a high school, people do dumb stuff. Didn’t you do dumb stuff when you were in high school?
Fenster: I did not. [laughter]
Pardlo: I did enough dumb stuff for the both of us.
Fenster: All right. Let’s go to a proper interview here. Do you remember how old you were the first time you tried to write poetry? Was it your middle school hip-hop phase?
Pardlo: No, actually… so he’s referring to a story I often tell in interviews where about seventh grade I started writing rap lyrics because I thought it was cool. And it was cool actually [laughter] to be honest.
Fenster: Was it good?
Pardlo: They were not good, it was not good at all. But the truth is I was was a romantic kid, when I was in third or fourth grade I’d go out into the woods. I’d have a little Polaroid camera, I’d take pictures of snow on trees. And I’d write about the snow on the merry-go-round… the playground, yes, and so…
Fenster: All right, when was it good? What was the first thing you wrote where you stopped and you went, “Not bad!”?
Pardlo: High school. I can’t say I was writing good poems overall but I knew there were moments… I could sense when the thing I was writing on the page seemed to do something that I didn’t feel I was entirely control of, when the language did something that seemed of its own volition and surprised me. And that was the feeling I wanted to keep getting, that surprise.
Fenster: It just popped into my head, an old memory. The newspaper also had an annual or every semester we did a poetry literature magazine and Greg, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet submitted a poem — he wasn’t the prize winner at that point — which our editors decided was not good enough for it. And then when he came in after writing the letter to the editor, the first time that he actually came to the office, there actually was a [reaction] “Oh, he’s black!” because it changed the way that they perceived the poem.
Pardlo: You never told me that story.
Fenster: I didn’t?
Pardlo: You never told me that story, that’s fascinating. Actually you may have told me and I forgot but that’s fascinating.
Fenster: A lot of forgotten things in those years. In terms of your writing process, do you have like tons of unfinished ideas that you keep coming back to or do you get an idea and say I have to finish this and focus on it until it’s done?
Pardlo: Well I try to be as disciplined as I can and work through something when… so inspiration is is a myth. Once you get to a certain point you can’t wait for inspiration. It is sit your butt in the chair and start writing, and you write until you make something happen. So most of writing is just an act of sheer discipline and will. And so yes, I keep a lot of, I do get moments of inspiration and I am diligent to scribble whatever inspiration has given me and provoked in me, but as far as developing full poems or essays or whatever I’m working on, that’s just a matter of habit.
Fenster: When you find inspiration elusive and you’re trying to find time to write something and it’s just not coming, do you find — I find for myself more in terms of music composition that when the world’s an open book and there are no constraints, I can’t come up with anything. I do better if I impose rules, say it has to be this, it has to be within these confines. Does that sort of thing work for you or how do you approach that?
Pardlo: Yeah, well that’s one technique. Every writer has their own kind of toolbox of things that they go back to — just like an athlete does calisthenics, stretches and warms up — when I sit down at my desk in the morning I will translate poems that are from a language that I don’t know, so I will get — well, German at this point it is not as entirely foreign, right — so I’ll take some Rilke or something another poet wrote in German, take down my German-to-English dictionary and just force myself to go through and try to make sense of the poem in the other language. That process gets me out of the routine habits of language in my in my head and that’s the thing I want to do, and so when inspiration is elusive as you say, it’s because I’m just stuck in a loop of cliched, routine thinking.
Fenster: I remember reading when I read something by Nabokov, I noticed in the foreward that it was the first book he had written in English — I had skipped the introduction and read the book, and then came back and read that — and I was struck by Nabokov’s amazing language choices and the whole point of it ultimately was that because he wasn’t writing in his native language he made choices that were very unusual.
Pardlo: Very unconventional use of language and we see that as really brilliant. I’m in no way suggesting that he first-timer’s luck at it, but there is something to be said for having some distance from the language as it is used idiomatically and colloquially. So much of, particularly in my poetry, so much of my work is trying to get out of the cliche blocks of language. So I think — and it’s probably true for most people in the room — we think in phrases and blocks of language that are already set up and we’re just kind of shuttling them back and forth and back and forth. I mean you hear what’s going to come next. And that’s a problem with good writing. You want the reader to pay attention to every word, you want the reader to be engaged every word and that means you have to surprise, you have to say it in unconventional ways.
Fenster: Fantastic segue. My favorite poem of yours comes from your first book, Totem. When I heard you read ”Double Dutch,” I was struck by the string of allusions and similes, a veritable whirlwind of cultural references. If we were here under different circumstances with more time, I’d spend a half hour unpacking each of those images and talking about that, but let’s have you read it before I ask you a question about it.
Pardlo:
Double Dutch
The girls turning double-dutch
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant’s pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion to share,
waiting her chance to speak. But she’s
anticipating the upbeat
like a bandleader counting off
the tune they are about to swing into.
The jumper stair-steps into mid-air
as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,
training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment
long enough to fit a second thought in,
she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish
as she flutter-floats into motion
like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos
thumbed alive. Once inside,
the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods
who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch
acquired Manhattan. How she dances
patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing
its travels in scale before the hive. How
the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
Her misted skin arranges the light
with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
surfaces fracturing and reforming
like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.
She makes jewelry of herself and garlands
the ground with shadows.
[applause]
Fenster: This poem about a girl jumping rope works in allusions to boxing, jazz, space exploration, fish, bees and on and on. That final line–
Pardlo: And the Dutch. [Note: I was so fixated on getting my question right that it didn’t sink in until typing the transcript, his play on Dutch in this poem. Dude can write. –BF]
Fenster: And probably others… but that final line kills me and what I’m going to ask you now in a way connects to some extent to something we’re going to be doing later. What’s the initial inspiration? I mean is it merely there’s a girl jumping rope. How does it go from initial idea visualization… I’ll stop talking.
Pardlo: Well, that poem was “inspired” by seeing girls jumping rope and thinking, “Oh my God, this is operatic, the orchestra of this thing, this activity, the coordination of the near clairvoyance between all three of them as they make this ballet happen and I wanted to honor that so I started working on the poem. That poem took me over three years to write and for a long time it went into… so the things that you hear, allusions to boxing — there was a whole digression on Muhammad Ali and the Rumble in the Jungle, there was allusions to space exploration, there was a whole thing on Buzz Aldrin, this long digression, it was like a five-page poem early on and over time I just kept boiling down to the one single core image that I thought was most essential and layered them that way.
Fenster: Totem, your first book came out in 2007 to high acclaim and it took you, you just mentioned, three years to write just the one poem in there — I assume you were writing other things [at the same time]…
Pardlo: Right, yeah.
Fenster: Otherwise you’d be 800 years old by the time you published a book, but it took you seven years before you finished your follow up, Digest, which won something called the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. The Pulitzer Committee wrote that your book featured clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st century America ,rich with thought ideas and histories public and private. So my question for you is one that I also think about sometimes: how do you stay humble and can you accept accolades at face value or do you psychologically kind of brush them off?
Pardlo: First of all, the cliche about poets is that we’re depressed and neurotic and that’s actually true [laughter] to a large extent, so you know I hear there’s the same kind of well-adjusted part of me that moves through the world professionally and gets things done but then there’s the deeply neurotic side, and this is in no way limited to me. This is a very common thing. Once I sit down everybody faces the blank page and there the anxiety of facing a blank page is as far as in my experience near universal and to put something on that page requires a great deal of humility because you have to put something down and then you have to face the fact that it sucks, that what I just wrote is god-awful, so now what do I do? And you have to be in the practice of being humble before the language and I keep using this word, but to honor the language, put the language above ego. That said, yeah it’s cool getting patted on the back and traveling around. It’s not like I’m a rock star. It’s not like I get to throw TVs off balconies.
Fenster: You had kids coming right up to you wanting to shake your hand and touch the author.
Pardlo: Yeah, that’s cool, that’s always cool. Yeah… but… it’s not a rock star life.
Fenster: Your latest work, Air Traffic, is a collection of essays that together form a memoir and most of the room has read parts of it. Did the decision to write the memoir have anything to do with pressure you might have felt following up an award-winning book? I mean, how does one follow up Blonde on Blonde or Songs in the Key of Life?
Pardlo: No, because I started writing that book well before. Digest was signed to the publisher in 2012; it came out in 2014, we won the Prize in 2015. I was already writing Air Traffic by 2011. I think in some sense I’d already give up on Digest, I wasn’t thinking about it.
Fenster: If your press is correct, every major publisher passed on it.
Pardlo: Every publisher passed on it, yes.
Fenster: Good job. [laughter]
Pardlo: Again, to the humility, it takes a lot to keep in mind that none of this is personal. The rejections of Digest were not rejections of me personally, and so I was already working on the new stuff.
Fenster: They are rejecting you personally.
Pardlo: [laughs] yes, yes.
Fenster: The title of your memoir comes in part from your family history starting with your grandfather in Oklahoma. About half of the audience has read chapter 2 of the book but for those who didn’t, let’s do the Cliff’s Notes version. First, what happened in Tulsa 1921 and how does that lead into your grandfather’s experience?
Pardlo: That little piece of history was something I discovered. I had heard about it, I kind of knew about in the back of my head but as I was researching my grandfather’s experience in Oklahoma, I was thinking what what else was going on in Oklahoma? I had never been to Oklahoma, I didn’t know anything about the history there so through my research I came across this anecdote of the Tulsa Massacre in which airplanes — this was 1921 — air travel was very new then — and this is something great — my grandfather got to Oklahoma in like 54 or something like that, maybe earlier, but this incident would have been very much in the minds of people here in Oklahoma when my grandfather arrived to train for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Fenster: And the incident being rich white people who had access to airplanes…
Pardlo: They owned airplanes and used these airplanes to drop bombs of basically there was flaming balls of tar on the wealthy black community there. Now Oklahoma was a wealthy state because at the time oil was just discovered and everybody was flush. So the black community in Tulsa was, according to historians, the wealthiest black community in the country at the time. And it was bombed. The irony of this being the place where my grandfather goes to train and this being the place where the first aerial attack on American soil takes place seemed unavoidable to me.
Fenster: the chapter focuses a bit on how we dealt with social expectations of the time period and this is a question that probably demands more time than we have to give, but I’ll ask it anyway. How have your own experiences in your life — pick any one of them or multiple of them — differed in terms from your grandfather, different or parallel? His grappling with people’s expectations of himself, because that was a theme that you hit upon…
Pardlo: One of the things I was interested in the book was the changing perceptions of race over time and I think it’s a misperception to think that America has always been racist in the very same way for the last 400 years. It hasn’t, in fact our perceptions, our conceptions of race have changed over time, and that’s something that fascinated me. So the perception of what blackness is and how one should perform a black identity for my generation is extremely different from what the expectations were for my grandfather. Now my grandfather is also coming from Philadelphia which was racist in very different ways but going to a segregated place like Oklahoma, he experienced a substantial amount of culture shock. Geographically race is constructed differently and temporally race is constructed differently and I wanted to think about how dynamic our identities are, in fact, as opposed to the assumption that identity is something static or fixed in some way.
Fenster: I think sometimes we think our parents are like everyone else. I always joke about when I hear a student say something like, “Hillsborough sucks!”… compared to what? What experience do you have? How many parents do you have that you’re comparing them to whom? But your father was not a normal person in a lot of different ways. A large portion of your book is about you grappling with your complicated relationship, a complex cocktail of love, fear, resentment, and idolatry. When would you say you began to comprehend that this drinking, troubled, outsized character of a man was unique, was different from other people’s dads?
Pardlo: Oh that’s a great question. Well probably not until I was in high school or even in college because to me, being in the family and not having much to… we’re not thinking about how he related to other fathers, he was just a difficult man. It was the circumstance I was born into and I deal with it and everybody deals with their own parents, fine. But then as I got older and meeting people whose parents were invested… My father was very deeply narcissistic and his idea was, “Look, I got you to 18, now get the hell out of my house.” And I thought that was normal and he wasn’t invested… it was almost a shock and a surprise to me to discover that there are parents in the world who would, for example, spend thousands of dollars to cheat to get their kids into college. [laughs] It just never occurred. It was a shocking surprise to me that they were parents in the world who would spend money on SAT prep. Who does that kind of thing? I just thought you did everything by the seat of your pants, use whatever you got in your pockets, that’s what you got. Go into the world and then figure it out. So it took awhile before I started to see that people were invested in subsequent generations and the ways that were unfamiliar.
Fenster: The book’s title chapter tells your father’s story during the air traffic controller strike in 1981. Why did you choose to “Pulp Fiction” this chapter and come at it in a non-linear chronology?
Pardlo: I’m not a historian and I’m not a labor theorist so I wanted to foreground my lens as a poet and so while I wanted to tell the story of the strike, I didn’t want to pretend that I was I was creating some definitive document or some definitive argument about who was right in the strike, who should have won, where our sympathies should lie… as with much of my poetry, I just wanted to complicate our views of the strike. Those who were alive at the time and remember will often have very two-dimensional views of the strike. They’ll think, “Reagan, what a scumbag, how he just fired all those people, I never forgave him for that” or “Unions suck, they’ve always sucked, and that was the moment we proved that we shouldn’t have unions” or “Unions are ineffective” or whatever. I wanted to complicate our perceptions of the value of unions, why unions come together, what the human affective, the emotional experience of being committed to a community means. And of course my long-term idea was that I’m making a commentary on how we construct ourselves as a nation, how we construct the “we” that is the United States of America.
Fenster: I should follow up on that, but I’m not going to. I’ll come back to it. I want to stay with your father for a bit. He went from a position of great importance. First, just generally, the job of air traffic controller is such an enormously important, stressful job with the lives of so many little own literally in your hands and then also as a spokesperson for the union. And he went from that position of great importance to having to completely lost it, which included the ability to support your family and you wrote that “he always carried a wounded quality he never quite shook.” You wrote a poem about this time period also from your first book that I would like you to read.
Pardlo: Sure, sure. I’m also thinking about masculinity. I’m thinking about our sense of… so we know this term “intersectionality.” I wanted to think about how my father’s identity was impacted by the loss of his job. In a lot of ways this poem was the genesis of Air Traffic.
Winter After The Strike
You believe,
if you cast wide enough
your net of want and will, something meaningful
will respond. Perhaps we are the response—
each a cresting echo hesitating, vibrant with the moment
before rippling back.
But you’re steadfast as Odysseus strapped to the mast, as you were
in ’81 when Reagan ordered you back to work. You were President
of the union local you steered with your working-man’s voice,
the voice that ground the Ptolemaic ballet of air traffic to
a temporary stop.
You used it to refuse to cross the picket line I walked
with you outside Newark International.
I miss sitting beside you at the console when you worked
graveyard shift in the tower. Mom and I visited with our
sleeping bags.
I could see the dark Turnpike for miles, the somber
office buildings winking insomniac cells, the tarmac
spread before us like a picnic blanket and you, like a jade Buddha
suffused in the glow of that radial EKG.
You’d push the microphone in front of me, nod, and let me give the word.
I called all my stars home, trajectories bent on the weight of my voice.
You say you miss tracking those leviathans, each one snagged on the barb
of your liturgy. I, too, get reeled in by the hard, now rusty music of your pipes.
I follow it back to the day of your accident in the story you tell:
you were sixteen, hurdling the railings dividing row-house porches
from one end of Widener Place to the other to impress Mom.
I imagine the way you cleared each one like a leaf bobbing on water, catching
the penultimate, the rubber toe of your Chuck Taylors kissed
by the rail, upsetting your rhythm and you roiled in the air headlong,
arms outstretched, stumbling toward the last like one hell-bent
or sick to the stomach. The way you landed, on your throat, the rail
could have taken your head clean off. Since then, your voice issues
like some wartime communiqué: a ragged, typewritten dispatch
which you swallow with your smoker’s cough black as a tire
spinning in the snow. That winter after the strike,
we were so poor you sold everything but the house. Tell me, Dad,
when you’d stand at the door calling me in for the night,
could you hear me speaking to snowflakes falling beneath the lamppost?
Could you hear me out there, imitating you imitating prayer?
[Applause]
Fenster: You were 13 years at the time of the strike and it seems only natural in general that you might want to emulate your father. How much of your imitation of him was informed by the actual understanding of the larger political, economic, personal circumstances and how much of it was just the natural he’s my dad?
Pardlo: At the time when I was 13? Oh no, he was just entirely a heroic figure to me. My father stood up to the President of the United States. You can’t get much cooler than that. There were there were FBI men parked out front of our house, they would follow me around the neighborhood as I’d skateboard around to my friend’s house. They’d come up to the door and knock on the door, see if my dad was home because the strike was illegal and so everyone, all the men and women who went on strike were criminals and so my dad was fleeing the law and I mean that was just an entirely romantic thing. Now in retrospect, that was very formative in my sense of my politics, and again my sense of commitment to a communal cause, a shared cause. I think that’s a heroic thing to commit one’s life to others.
Fenster: One thing I’ve always wondered about and particularly when we look at a poem like this one which is so incredibly not just personal, but so specific. Do you consider your audience and whether or not a poem like that will resonate with people who don’t share those specific experiences or reference points or do you think that the emotions that you’re evoking like what you were just talking about are so universal that people will will get it even though their dad was not a PATCO representative?
Pardlo: I could always imagine somebody not liking the poem. Why would I do that? So I imagine people who are coming to the poem for the same reasons that I come to poems, and all literature, and that is to learn a different way to see my own life, and that is I want someone else’s very specific experience so that it can help contextualize what I am experiencing. Ultimately yeah, I think these emotions, the core emotions are all universal: we have fathers, we have mothers, we have envy and ambition, and all these stories are centered on some fundamental human emotion. So I write as specifically as I possibly can, and I hear some of my students sometimes say, “Well, I wanted to keep it vague so that people could imagine their way into the poem…” Now you’re making the reader do all the work. It’s actually the opposite, the more specific you are, the more a reader can come in and actually see that the concreteness of the poem.
Fenster: Speaking of the universal emotions, I think everyone craves the approval of their parents. Some of us are blessed with parents who regularly provide us with positive affirmations and some of us are you and me. To be fair, my mom’s really good the last years. What was it that your father texted you when he found out that you had won the Pulitzer Prize?
Pardlo: I told you my dad was narcissistic. He died in 2016, but he obviously lived long enough to know that I’d won the Pulitzer, and I didn’t hear from him. He competed with me in his own way which was absolutely ridiculous and it’s something I wasn’t aware of, I mean I was probably aware of it you know but you don’t actually consciously think about these things until there’s some distance. So my dad hadn’t said anything about it and a week or so had gone by, so I texted him. I said “Did you hear the news?” and he texted me back, “When a Roman general conquered a town, Caesar would send a slave to ride alongside that general to remind him he’s only human.” That’s it. That was his entire response. Okay Dad, all right.
Fenster: Don’t forget you suck.
Pardlo: Thinking back to your earlier question about the staying humble, I don’t have any problem finding the humble.
Fenster: Senior was working on making sure that it didn’t go to your head.
At this point the camera battery died and a chunk of the interviewing, including a poetry reading of “Raisin” was lost, along with a question from the audience. Picking up with Greg’s response to a question:
Pardlo: Digest was largely written around my getting sober. I was… I am an alcoholic and around 2011 I stopped drinking and the poems are about coming to terms with being a father, I’d just had two small kids and the responsibility of that suggested and my anxieties and my neuroses… just in general, how do I become a responsible person in the world when I think I’m such a scumbag. The poems are infused with that anxiety and that tension.
Student: To any aspiring writers here, including myself, what advice would you give us?
Pardlo: The advice I often give… you’re going to hear all the regular advice of read read read. That’s certainly important but I if I could say anything alternative to that is travel. Travel, and that doesn’t mean necessarily travel around the globe, that means travel to someplace where you are not the norm, somewhere where all of your expected clues and cultural assumptions are not in place and so you will have to contend with, you have to face all of your cultural assumptions and figure out what those cultural assumptions are and figure out a way to relate to the environment that isn’t relying on other people, assuming that somebody else is going to get what I’m saying.
Student: I’m also thinking of writing at some point in the future, especially like a memoir, like I’m really into that. My main question is how did you write about your family and stuff without them being “Why did you put that in the book?”
Pardlo: So as I mentioned my father was narcissistic, so he was like, yeah of course you want to write about me. [laughter] That took care of that. My mother is an artist. My mother was the strange kind of hippie-ish person who was like “You can do anything” and so she was always cool and other than that most people in my family are either artists primarily in some way or do something tangential to their regular lives that is in the arts. And so my being a writer was just like “Oh that’s Greg’s thing, we’re going to show up in his poems.” So it was just understood. The question gets a little different when I think about writing about my kids because they don’t have the agency to say “Don’t write about me,” because they’ve never known anything different, and that’s a little trickier question that I’m still grappling with. It’s like putting pictures of your kids on Instagram. At some point they’re going to grow up and be like “Why the hell did you do that?” [laughter]
Fenster: Especially the bathtub photos.
Pardlo: Especially the bathtub photos, but they’re so cute. [laughter]
Student: Do you have any tips about writing memoirs on where to start?
Pardlo: The way I went about writing mine was I did not try to write a cradle-to-grave kind of narrative. I started with something that I was interested in. In fact I started with the air traffic control strike. There’s an idea that I’m interested in that involves my life profoundly and so that was how I got into it and the other chapter/essays in the book were all similarly… there’s an idea of about home ownership. My wife and I when we bought our house in 2005, it was the first time either of us or the first time anyone had owned property in her family, and what does it mean to own property and so I was fascinated with the question rather than — this kind of gets to your question earlier about not saying look at me, this is about me, I’m more interested in the cultural phenomenon, the philosophical questions, or whatever it is that involves me and I’m using myself as a lens to talk about that thing.
Student: Did you feel that any of your father’s or grandfather’s experiences impacted you as a writer?
Pardlo: Yeah, absolutely. I think about “how hard my life is” and then I imagine my grandfather going to Oklahoma City. The campus where the academy — of course Oklahoma was segregated — he could not ride the bus at all. There was no bus that my grandfather could take to the academy. They didn’t allow him to eat lunch on the campus, so he not only had to walk to the academy but he had to walk out to get lunch and/or eat his lunch outside of the cafeteria. And people were kicking dirt at him, calling him all kinds of awful names. And I think about my father as an activist and all of the work he did not only as a student activist but also as a labor activist, and yeah I can step up my game.
Student: When reading Air Traffic, you talked about how you as a poet shone through when you were writing for your memoir. But when we read your poetry in class, we really saw how it was constructed more like a traditional chapter in a novel might be. So I wanted to ask where do you think a line can be drawn between poetry and a story or do you think there has to be a line?
Pardlo: I think about the essays in Air Traffic as extended poems. I think about the nice long poems and so the logic behind them is very much elliptical. The difference is that the poems are more interested in the language. Poems will always have a narrative element and that’s a given, but what I’m interested more in the poem is the language and the play of the language than necessarily telling the story. The way I think about the world as a prose writer when I’m writing prose is imagine I’m standing inside the door, there’s a screen, and outside the door is a porch and then the meadow, and let’s have a horse trotting by. Beautiful, right? As a prose writer I’m interested in telling the story of the horse trotting by. As the poet I’m interested in the schmutz that’s stuck on the screen door. Everything that I see, the horse that I see, is mediated by the screen, that screen in the analogy is language itself. I’m more interested in language. Of course, the horse is still going to be in it but I’m more interested in the happy coincidences of “Raisin” than I am in say this happened, this happened, and this happened.
Fenster: For the record, I taught him all the Yiddish that he knows.
Student: If you had an opportunity to make a movie about your memoir, what actor would you have play you in the film?
Pardlo: Not long after the book came out, I got a call from Plan B Productions, that’s the company that did Moonlight and 12 Years A Slave. And so we were talking about how do we do this, how do we structure the book as a film, and I again texted my dad to to tell him … no wait I misremembered. After we sold the book Air Traffic to the publisher I texted my dad to tell him and my dad just texted back did with “Denzel Washington,” that’s all the text said. Of course his suggestion was that he would be Denzel Washington… I don’t know. I don’t know who I’d cast.
Student: Barack Obama. [laughter]
Pardlo: That is a fantastic idea, that would be so cool!
Student: You kind of touched upon briefly about how your experiences in life shaped your politics, but do you think of telling your story, like especially with your dad being president of a union, do you see that as in a way being inherently political?
Pardlo: Yes, absolutely, I think all writing is a political act. Just saying “I have a voice, I exist” breaks through every assumption that we have about people right once we have access to someone’s interior life, it is not possible for us to stereotype that person. I guess we could if we really tried but you have a really freaking ignorant to do that. But I think just the mere act of writing itself refuses stereotypes. It says we are individuals with interior lives that are unique and we should think about each other as such.
Student: There are a lot of kids that when they’re children, they think that they want to be a writer or a poet or something. They grow up, get to high school and they realize how hard it is actually just write on your own and make a living that way. Then some people find out that they really want to do it and decide to go that path, and so especially with the lack of support from your father and other elements in your life, how were you able to make it, you were really able to find yourself?
Pardlo: That’s a great question, thanks. My grandfather, the same grandfather I have been talking about, when he was hired he was also a jazz musician. I said earlier that everyone in the family is in the arts or has some tangential thing in the arts, and he played jazz piano and he always wanted to do that for good, so when he retired he bought a little bar in Pennsauken, New Jersey and turned it into a jazz club. And I got to run the jazz club and every weekend there were these musicians who had devoted their lives to their instrument and they were brilliant and they would sit around and talk the way that we talk after playing and they were engrossed in the music and they had all these ideas about the music and it was just fascinating to me that they did not seem interested in fame or any kind of celebrity, all the bling that goes along with that stuff that I thought one worked toward. And at the end of the night, I would hand each one of them like 50 bucks. I’m paying this guy or this woman who has all this history of training and devotion to their craft 50 bucks. That took a while… it wasn’t like an overnight a-ha, but the lesson I took from that was there is another way to value life that is not measured by financial success and that did blow my mind. I dropped out of school and back and out of school and back, when I went back in the third time when I finally went back, I said, “Well, I don’t care, I love books, I love talking about books, I know I can at least put a roof over my head and feed myself. I’ll be good.” And once I did that, I call it like my burning the boats moment. I think I committed my life to literature and it’s worked out. [laughter]
Fenster: And that is a perfect place to stop. Thank you, Greg Pardlo. [applause]
Fenster on Education 