Poet Ben Mirov is coming into his own this year. With two books now in print, both having won publication awards, there is a substantial collection of poems to read and admire. The absolutely compellingGhost Machine, winner of the Caketrain Chapbook Competition, is now being reprinted for a second run. I talked to Ben Mirov via email aboutGhost Machine and I is to Vorticism (winner of the Diagram/New Michigan Press Chapbook Award), both published in 2010. I is to Vorticism is as much a standout collection, but also markedly different: lyrical, surrealist, and moving. I asked Mirov about his aesthetics, his origins and influences as a poet, and his own editorial experience forLIT and pax americana, hoping to delve into some of the secrets behind these little masterpieces.
Sean Patrick Hill: When did you begin as a poet? What gave you your start?
Ben Mirov: I wrote a poem in sixth grade about a rock in a field that watches the passage of time. At one point in the poem, tractors come and tear the field apart. It rhymed and was heavily influenced by Robert Frost, because I hadn’t read any poetry by anyone except Frost and Lewis Carroll at that time.
Every year my middle school would attend a county-wide literary festival where students could enter poetry, essays, and stories into contests. If you won you got to stand up in front of an audience of students and teachers and receive an award. I came in third place in the poetry contest. After that, I got the idea that I was good at writing poems, so I kept doing it.
SPH: From your perspective on contemporary poetry, do you see any sort of tradition being responded to?
BM: I was reading plenty of poetry from the ’60s and ’70s about the time I began to write Ghost Machine. People like Creeley, Olson, Joanne Kyger, Robert Duncan, Ferlinghetti, Meltzer, John Wieners, Philip Whalen, Clark Coolidge, to mention a few. I imagine I was responding to some of the things I saw in those writers’ lives and writing, if only incidentally, when I was writing Ghost Machine.
SPH: How do you see your poetry as fitting into the contemporary grain, and even the larger context of art and society as a whole?
BM: I don’t think much about my poetry fitting into the ethos. I hope it does, but that’s it. It seems more important to me to move from poem to poem and book to book with the intent of creating the best work I possibly can. Beyond that, thoughts about making work for a particular moment in time or audience seem too abstract.
SPH: Do you have any intention while you are writing poems? How do they happen for you? Are your poems born of ideas, emotions, doubts, or something else? Or nothing at all?
BM: I’d say my poems are born of d) All of the above.
I think the most important part of writing poems is following your instinct. I start poems with the obtuse intent of writing the best poem possible. Once I’m in the midst of writing, I just try to be as attentive as possible to what makes the poem itself. Sometimes I let mistakes lead me to the next line, other times rhyme or rhythm leads me through, other times imagery or humor. The most important value you can have as a writer is the willingness to forego your values and that, in my mind, means following your instincts.
Generally, every poem happens differently. One constant I’ve noticed is that I rely on my brain to understand more than it knows it does. The part of my brain that leads me through the day, the conscious part, is pretty inept. But I put a lot of stock in the deeper parts of my brain, the parts that continue to work on poems when I’m asleep or at work or daydreaming. All my best intentions, ideas, images, et cetera come from those parts.
SPH: You use Jack Spicer as an epigraph in Ghost Machine; is Spicer a particular influence on you? If so, how? Do you find any theory playing itself out in your writing?
BM: Spicer has influenced me in two ways. First, I’ve always felt his life as a writer has an integrity to it that I try to mimic in my own life. I love the way he published on a small scale, almost exclusively in chapbooks and small journals. There was never a sense that he sold out to anything or anyone. His life was austere. He valued his friends more than anything except maybe the practice of poetry. I don’t get the impression he was writing poems for prizes or fame, although I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have rejected either. I also like the way he progressed from project to project, thinking about each individual book without any sense of developing a style or some kind of niche for himself (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In the end, the unity of Spicer’s style is apparent, but it seems so natural and incidental to his life in poetry.
I feel like the same sense of integrity I see in Spicer’s life can be found in his poems, too. The way they defy the intellect’s ability to understand what they’re about. His poems are intellectually grounded, charismatic, emotional, but they never really give themselves up. For me it’s like they exist in another dimension, just out of reach, where, at their best, they attain a sort of maximum potential. Also, in terms of the varied texture of his collected works, Spicer’s creative capacity and the imaginative breadth of his oeuvre seem very idiosyncratic, which is something I’d like to achieve in my own work over the course of my life.
SPH: Who are your most important influences, both contemporary and of the past?
BM: In terms of the influences that went into Ghost Machine: The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, recreational drug use, Micha Ballard’s poetry, Cedar Sigo’s poetry,Endtroducing by DJ Shadow, Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Pierre Reverdy, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Juan Gris, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and San Francisco. There are probably others I’ve forgotten or of which I’m not aware. The Dream Songs, for example, were brought up by you in your review of Ghost Machine inBookslut. I didn’t make that connection until you mentioned it, and then I saw how valid it was.
Poets and poetic influences I value in a more general sense (besides those previously mentioned): Paige Taggart; Pictures from Brueghel by William Carlos Williams; early James Tate books (especially Reckoner and Absences); the life and work of Robert Walser; “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka; just about everything Samuel R. Delany has ever written; Amy Lawless; Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez; Victor Cayro; Ralph Angel; the essays and poetry of Edgar Allen Poe; Go Your Stations, Girl by Carl R. Martin; Curtis Jensen’s poetry; “Borges and I” by Jorge Luis Borges; Brandon Downing’s films, collages and poetry; Sampson Starkweather; chapbook culture during the ’60s and ’70s; Envelope of Night by Michael Burkard; more music than I can mention; Black Automaton by Douglas Kearny and Douglas Kearny’s reading style; Brandon Johnson’s poetry; the first time I read John Ashbery; the first time I read The Archaic Torso of Apollo. There are others (I failed to mention my favorite movies).
SPH: How did Ghost Machine come about as a concept? How did it evolve?
BM: I began writing Ghost Machine after a breakup. I suddenly found myself sleeping on my brother’s couch, I was jobless, and I’d lost my love. I would write mostly to pass time and to deal with my emotional state. I would sit down and fill pages with sentences. I didn’t write using line breaks at all. I wasn’t concerned with writing poetry at that point. Sentences appealed to me more because I didn’t have to think as much. I could just write to the end of the page until the page was filled, or until I felt done and then start over. I also didn’t think much about the content of what I was writing. I would write about anything that seemed close at hand. Events in my life, events in my friends’ lives, things I had dreamt, sentences composed of nonsense or things I’d overheard in conversations or on TV. I was open to writing anything. I didn’t really care about where the sentences came from.
I amassed a large amount of sentences this way. Some of the things I wrote were published, but for the most part, I didn’t do anything with all the raw material I’d created. Eventually I got a job at a foster care home. I found a place to live. Things got better, but I continued to write in the same manner. I wrote about a lot of the things I saw at my job. Working with the kids at the foster care home shapedGhost Machine. The poem “Ghost Drafts” is primarily about my job at that time and the employees and kids at my job. I would see ten-year-olds do violent things to each other. I would have to do things like physically restrain kids for long periods of time because they were in danger of hurting themselves or others. My life outside my job, time I would spend partying, also became subject matter for Ghost Machine.
Sometime during this period, I got accepted to The New School’s MFA program and moved to New York. After I moved and started grad school, I began to revise Ghost Machine. It was during this time that I began to see all the sentences I had written as a unified manuscript. I treated individual sentences as units of construction, like bricks. I would take individual sentences and collage them together into larger pieces of writing. Eventually the structure of Ghost Machine worked itself out.
SPH: Can you explain the importance of your use of the declarative sentence in Ghost Machine? It’s obviously important.
BM: I wasn’t consciously using declarative sentences when I first wroteGhost Machine. Two years after the initial period of writing the raw material for the book (which I didn’t even think of as a book at first), I began to revise everything with the intent of creating a manuscript. Part of the process was to substantiate a mass of experience that was essentially insubstantial or ephemeral: fragmented thoughts, banal observations, pieces of found language, remembered utterances from conversations or television, sentences written about things that had happened to me or others. I wanted to make pieces of writing that had structural integrity and, looking back, I guess my feeling was there was something structurally sound about short, declarative sentences. Like they made good building blocks.
SPH: The first two poems in this book demonstrate two different approaches you make use of: one seems to resemble more of a prose poem, the other appears more traditional, using lines. Why the difference?
BM: When I was revising Ghost Machine, in the early form the manuscript took, there were only prose poems. I showed a draft to my teacher and friend, Elaine Equi, and she suggested I add more texture to the manuscript. So I went back through and added the lineated poems as a way of varying the poems.
One thing about the lineated poems is that I chose not to break the sentences. Each line is composed of a single sentence. I liked the natural, unmanipulated feel of the prose poems so I transferred some of that to the lineated poems by not breaking the sentences.
SPH: Why “Eye, Ghost”? There has been some criticism on the use of “eye” for “I,” but why did you choose to do that?
BM: The “eye”/“I” conceit goes back to Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, so it’s not my idea to begin with. I appropriated it for “Eye, Ghost” because I saw the “I” in the poem (and in the entire collection) as a passive construct which just takes things in as a sort of bystander, much like the anatomical eye, which has to look at everything its owner wants it to. I liked the idea that the “I” could be controlled by something beyond itself, like the anatomical eye, so that, in a sense, “I” is just a piece of anatomy at work in a much larger machine and/or organism.
Also, the “eye”/“I” comparison sums up how I felt about myself at the time I wrote Ghost Machine. I often had the feeling I was just watching things happen and recording them in an extremely passive way, like an eyeball.
SPH: One section of the book focuses on different types of machines. What is the significance, to you, of the machine? And for that matter, of the ghost?
BM: At the time I think I found it comforting that I could take a group of sentences that were essentially ephemeral in terms of their subject matter, and arrange them into a machine that performed a function, even if the only function of the machine was to affirm its own existence.
The ghosts were like that, too. When I was revising the original sentences into pieces of writing, it occurred to me that they seemed to recall moments that were fleeting and/or insignificant, if only because of how subjective they were. By arranging them into individual works, it seemed to me like I was giving them a form in which they could exist as a unified entity. That somehow by compiling them together, their insubstantial nature would become the basis for their existence.
I also like the idea that a ghost is an apparition that comes back to haunt you or deliver a message to you. I wanted the poems to have that effect on me and others who read them; even if it was unclear what message the ghost was delivering and why, I wanted the poems to create a sense that something essential was being transferred from poem to reader.
SPH: “Ghost Drafts” is a longer version of the mainly shorter poems in the book; what is the difference between the two?
BM: I’d say the biggest difference is its form. “Ghost Drafts,” and “Eye, Ghost” were both written within a form I made up. Each poem is composed of ten sections, each section has ten lines and each line is composed of ten words. I wrote “Ghost Drafts” first because I felt like an early version of the manuscript needed more variety and texture (it was composed mainly of prose poems at that point). I fixated on the number ten because I liked the way it was composed of a one and a zero, the smallest possible unit we have for counting and the figure we use to represent nothing.
Something about the combination of the one and the zero in the number ten seemed to parallel the ideas and emotions and overall aesthetic aims of Ghost Machine, so I used it to build “Ghost Drafts.” Then, later in the process, a symmetry began to develop in the book and I decided I needed another poem to balance “Ghost Drafts,” so I wrote “Eye, Ghost.”
SPH: What is the sensibility, do you think, that guided the crafting of the poems? That is, is there any sort of particular magnetism that draws the sentences and images together, any logic that creates their coherence? In fact, what do you think about coherence in poetry in general?
BM: I think the coherence in the poems, if there is any, comes from two aspects of the collection. The first is the manner in which the raw material was written. My emotional state and my approach to writing during the time I composed most of the sentences that went into Ghost Machine created a mass of work that had a natural homogeny to it. The second thing that created the coherence of Ghost Machine occurred during the drafting process. I decided which sentences should go into a poem and the order of the sentences based on rhythm. For one sentence to go next to another, they had to sound like they belonged next to each other. That way I could ignore the content of the sentences, and avoid creating any type of linear narrative, while still trying to create a piece of work that had fluidity and cohesion.
SPH: There is also quite a bit of repetition, even if it’s the repeating of lines with subtle differences. Why do this? Are you simply playing with alternate meanings or something else entirely?
BM: During the drafting process, I would make mistakes while retyping lines. Often the typos would be better than the originals, so I would keep them. This gave me the idea to use permutations of sentences throughout the collection.
Also, I think part of my life at the time I wrote the material forGhost Machine was the feeling that I was living in a loop. Everything felt the same to me, whether it was being spit on or hit by a kid I was working with or sleeping with someone I was dating, or just being alone in my room late at night. Things were always different, but they were the same as well. So this idea worked its way into the final manuscript. I like the idea that a reader might encounter a slightly altered version of a sentence they had previously read and they would feel something uncanny, or at least close in nature to the way I felt about reality when I was writing Ghost Machine.
The entire book is supposed to function in a repetitive way. The structure of Ghost Machine is a loop. This isn’t something that’s come up in any reviews of the book before, but the book is meant to loop on itself, like a Möbius strip. All of the sections contain ten poems, except the first and the last, which contain five poems each. That’s because the first and last sections are meant to be one single section. The first poem in the last section is called “First Ghost.” In my mind, that poem is where the collection begins, not with “Ghost of a Morning After You Left Me,” the literal first poem in the book. Much like the repeating lines, the loop form of the book is meant to encourage readers to move throughGhost Machine endlessly, always noticing permutations of meaning within the poems and the book as a whole.
SPH: Your use of images stands out here. One sentence that relates to this is the line “I give them a place to live” (p. 96). How do you view your own poems and images? What I mean is, do you think these poems are trying to save a part of your life, or are they utterly creative constructions with their own life, or a bit of both?
BM: I think they are both trying to conserve a particular moment in time as well as exist as creative constructions. Ghost Machine is necessarily constructed of what I think of as pieces of my life from a particular period of time, but I hope that other people see themselves in the writing.
SPH: I’d like to shift the conversation now to another one of your creative roles. Regarding your editor duties with both pax americanaand LIT, what are you trying to do? Do you feel you are promoting any certain aesthetic? What do you feel is the contribution to the public-at-large of an editor and publisher?
BM: I don’t purposefully promote an aesthetic. In all my editorial work, I think of myself as a cipher. pax americana has become more of a place to showcase other editors and their tastes and connections to writers and particular scenes. I edit an issue every once in a while, but for the most part, I just choose people with connections to other interesting writers and scenes and provide them with a venue.
Working as poetry editor of LIT reflects my tastes in a more direct way. The issues I’ve done so far are examples of poetry I’m into in the particular moment. I like to think of editorial work as a reflection of my life as a writer. Like I could go back and look at the people in each issue and the pieces I chose and somehow that would reflect my movement through poetry as a way of life.
If some kind of aesthetic comes from this, so be it. But I never expect unity in anything I do. I see my editorial work in the same way I see my persona, like a collage, the pieces of which have been taken from all over the place without any sense of end product. It’s more about the process of gathering the elements and how they fit together than it is about having something unified or whole in the end.
SPH: I’d like to turn now to I is to Vorticism. Much of it seems to be about what you refer to in the poem “Lifetime Achievement”: “My Ben Mirov.” Is this book different for you? If so in what way, and if not, why not?
BM: I think it’s different mostly in terms of the process by which I wroteI is to Vorticism. There wasn’t the same initial period of recording raw material and a secondary stage of returning to and reconfiguring that same material into pieces of writing that the process of writing Ghost Machine involved.
But I think I is to Vorticism and Ghost Machine both depend on the self for some sort of coherence. All the material in Ghost Machine had to be filtered through Ben Mirov, whereas I is to Vorticism takes Ben Mirov as a subject or some kind of character that wanders around and bumps into things.
I also think I is to Vorticism is more romantic in the traditional sense than Ghost Machine. Most of the poems came from moments of inspiration and/or the examination of intense feelings in moments of repose. Part of the creation of Ghost Machine involved writing in a sort of emotionless, empty state. I was just allowing observations and language to pile up without thinking about how others would read the poems.
The poems in I is to Vorticism are part of a larger manuscript called Hider Roser, which is more traditional, in a romantic sense, thanGhost Machine. The poems are more ostensibly emotional, lyrical and imaginative than those in Ghost Machine. They also rely more on images and ideas that bubble up from my subconscious, whereas Ghost Machine is more about concrete observations based on external reality.
SPH: Some of the poems in I is to Vorticism even seem to be narrative, at least to a degree. Is narrative something you’re interested in? Do you think narrative has a place in poetry?
BM: I never really think about the validity of narrative poetry vs. non-narrative poetry. For me the need to decide between one category or the other seems unnecessary. What’s more important is that I be able dip into either and apply them to a poem I’m working on whenever it seems appropriate.
Writing Ghost Machine, for example, called for a derangement of narrative impulses that can be traced back to poets who tend to be associated with non-narrative poetry like Spicer, Lyn Hejinian, and Ron Silliman. But the poems in I is to Vorticism seemed to naturally tend towards narrative arcs, so I went with it.
Also, I think everything has a place in poetry. I can’t think of anything that can’t be incorporated into poetry. Anybody who tells you otherwise is afraid of the future.
SPH: Many of the poems also feel “lyrical.” Do you consider your poems in any way what we would normally think of as lyrical, or even song-like?
BM: Absolutely. If I had any consistent goal with the majority of the poems in I is to Vorticism, especially the lineated ones, it was to write lyrics. In many instances musicality lead me from line to line. When I didn’t know where to go next I’d try to let rhythm, assonance, rhyme lead me to the next word or line.
When I read the poems in Ghost Machine, I do my best to sound like a computer. I try to read in an emotionless monotone, so that all the words carry roughly the same value. Reading the poems in I is to Vorticism to an audience, I feel like the poems have a natural emotionality to them I try to contain with my voice. I read in a sort of sustained pitch that tries to encapsulate the emotionality and lyric nuances.
SPH: The poem “The Poem Addresses Ben Mirov in a State of Inconsolable Grief” has fun with language, but also (I think) is pretty serious about the whole affair of our constructed reality. Could you elaborate on your idea that, as you say, “the world is made of language”?
BM: One of the things I think I is to Vorticism is about is that the inner-world, despite its inchoate, insubstantial, whimsical nature, is as real as the reality we share, or the real world, or whatever. “The Poem Addresses Ben Mirov in a State of Inconsolable Grief” is, in part, about the times when the inner-world creates the outer-world.
The poem is narrated by “The Poem,” and the narration changes common objects into translations of themselves. So, “car” becomes “star,” “home” becomes “bone.” And I think part of the idea behind this is what you pointed out in your question. “The Poem” constructs the reality, but it’s a reality that, though subjective and constructed, is as valid and potentially more meaningful than the one on which it bases itself.
SPH: In closing, what place do you find in your poetry for hope? I see it, at least, glowing like an aura around many poems, especially in I is to Vorticism. Do you see your poetry as incorporating something powerful and moving, something hopeful?
BM: I feel like all poems are essentially hopeful. Even if a poem is depressing and hopeless, its existence, the feeling that it has conveyed something, is miraculous and hopeful. So, yes, I feel like my poems are hopeful and I love the idea that that hope might glow around them like an aura. I’ll take that. |
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