Writing Seminars professor John Irwin spoke to the News-Letter about his new book, an epic poem As Long As It's Big, published recently under the pen name John Bricuth.
N-L: Why did you choose to write this novel in narrative poetry?
JI: Well, remember that the great tradition of poetry has always had long narratives. c9 Narratives were done in poetry before they were ever done in prose, that was the staple, going back to the Iliad and The Odyssey, so why at this point? Simply because I had made a decision several years ago to do longer narratives in poetry because I think in a longer narrative you can get at emotions and feelings about life that are often difficult to get at in a shorter poem, particularly those emotions that have to do with living experience and the sense of what life is about after you've lived it for 40 or 50 years.
N-L: Do you have a specific writing process?
JI: I was chairman [of Writing Seminars] for 19 years, and over that time I developed the ability to write while other things were going on. So generally speaking I write in the afternoons in the office. If it's a specific writing technique, it is the ability to keep writing no matter how many interruptions. I tend to think that energizes me, because I also feel that whenever there is a spare moment I better write as much as I can because there is going to another interruption pretty soon.
N-L: Did you plan out the entire story before you started writing? Did you start with a premise of where you wanted to go?
JI: There was an earlier work called Just Let Me Say This About That. I worked out a lot of the things I carried over into this poem, which is to say I worked out a lot of the questions about the blank verse line and about a contemporary diction that would fit in the blank verse line, also for a situation that would be a dialogue where people would be talking back and forth. What I wanted in this poem was another recognizable format with several people together talking back and forth in a dialogue in which people tell the story of their life-or their marriage in this case- and in the telling of the story try to come to terms with what it meant and in trying to come to terms with what it meant, say what they think the kinds of things in life that are meaningful are. The kinds of things you can do, or achieve, or live through that give value to life. I set out in both these long poems to write what might be called "wisdom poetry"; stories of people that are stories about what life is and what it means.
N-L: Is it difficult for you to write narrative poetry?
JI: No, it gets easier! It took me 16 years to write Just Let Me Say This About That; it took me about 5 and a half years to write As Long As It's Big, which is twice as long as Just Let Me Say This About That. I don't know if that means I'm getting better, but I'm certainly getting faster. I think I have the story in mind when I start writing; I have roughly in mind a sense of where I wanted to end, but when you're involved in writing something long, you don't want to know all the things that are going to happen too soon, because then writing it gets boring. You want to get up in the morning and approach the
work with things that are still uncertain because that keeps it interesting.
N-L: Is there a reason you publish under the name John Bricuth?
JI: Yes, I've done this since I've started publishing poetry. I've always wanted the poetry and the criticism to be accepted on its own basis. You may notice that often if someone writes both criticism and poetry, you become better known for one than for the other- in my case criticism as opposed to poetry- what usually happens then ever after is the one for which you are less known for always gets reviewed as, in my case, the poetry of a critic. I wanted each of them to be considered on their own merits without relation to one or the other. I just want it to be looked at as poetry on its own merits
N-L: What inspired you to write about these specific topics? Have you written about them in the past?
JI: The characters in this poem, some of them have the same names as the characters in my other poem. Sir in the previous novel was the President or God and is the Judge here; Bird, Fox and Fish were the questioners in the previous novel and here they are the two lawyers, Fox and Bird, and Mr. Fish is being sued by his wife for divorce. And in some sense, what I wanted was another situation in which people were in crisis and were having to narrate their lives, and narrate them in such a way as to say what was meaningful in their lives. There comes a point at a certain time of your life when you feel you need to look back on it and see what it all meant. And in some sense that was the situation here. So it was to carry over those; Sir from being God to being the Judge and the other figures in such a way that between them they narrated something that would hopefully impart a bit of wisdom about what life means after you've lived it for sixty years.
N-L: What do want your readers to get out of As Long As It's Big?
JI: Well, I hope they laugh at the funny parts. What I had aimed for in doing these two narrative poems, is that sense of life having lived experience over a certain number of years and the kind of wisdom that that imparts, and the sense of the way in which life doesn't know, doesn't recognize generic differences such as tragedy and comedy, it doesn't separate them. They all become together in the same event. One thing I always admired about Shakespeare is the way he understood that if you put the very funny things and the very tragic things side by side, it makes the funny things funnier and the tragic things more tragic. What I'd most like them to enjoy is the language. It took me a long time to write it, looking for the exact words, and anybody who likes poetry likes the sound of the words, the sound it makes.
N-L: One thing I liked is that the language gave each character such a distinct personality, who they were.
JI: it's interesting, because what I always kept in mind while writing this was that I would allow the Judge, Fox and Bird a certain level of verbal inventiveness because as judge and lawyers they made their living by talking. But I wouldn't allow that to Mr. and Mrs. Fish, because talking wasn't their stock of trade. And so there was that appreciation for character.
N-L: Why did you title the book As Long As It's Big?
JI: It's one of the lines she [Mrs. Fish] says at one point; she says something about her life and her marriage seeming like a failure to her. She says this; "Still,/ By any measure that you use, my life/ Has failed in everything I cared for most./ But like Bill said once, anyone who's born here/ Knows down deep, whether something seems/ A Failure or a success, at last that matters/ Less to folks like us, as long, sir, as it's big./Yet even by that standard I don't count" (pg 162-3).
N-L: What is currently on your reading list?
JI: I'm trying to finish a long critical book on the poet Hart Crane I've worked on it off and on for 35 years, so what I'm currently reading is most of the texts that Crane had read during his life while writing the poems c9. I sort of hate to admit this, but most of the reading I do is for stuff I'm working on. But I'm also reading Italio Calvino's The Baron and the Trees.
N-L: What authors or books do you recommend to current college students?
JI: I got an e mail from someone in the 9th grade, saying what would I recommend as a book to read for a student who was heading for college who was interested in literature. I said, I would recommend, if you haven't read already, The Great Gatsby and if you've already read that Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. But I regularly teach "Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway" so all those novels and this spring I'm teaching "Eliot, Crane and Stevens", so it will be The Wasteland and all of Eliot, Eliot's criticism, and all of Stevens' poetry and criticism and all of Crane's poetry.
N-L: Are there any books that you had read as a student that influenced your writing or you in some way?
JI: I'll tell you one book; I always recommend it to any student interested in American literature, particularly in modern American literature. If you really want to understand what lies behind modern American literature, I mean literature in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, the book to read is The Education of Henry Adams. It's a book about a prominent American in the 19th century who lives into the 20th century and it's a book about the way in which the world view, the way people changed from the 19th to the 20th century. It's the perfect book to read to understand the novels of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemmingway to understand the impact the first World War had, the impact of the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918/20 because those are two enormous disasters with enormous loss of life. When you understand that preceded the 1920s, you understand why the Roaring Twenties roared, because people had seen so many people die, that they just wanted to get the most out of life in the shortest amount of time. I read it in college or graduate school; I think that if I had read it earlier, I would have understood a lot of books sooner than I did.
