Featured Writer #130: Weston Morrow

Nathan Metz (NM): Construction of place feels vital to Cloud Builder – proper names are sprinkled throughout the collection, with references to the Pacific Northwest’s colossally natural (Mt. Rainer, Mount St. Helens) and colossally manufactured (Narrow’s Bridge, the now-gone Kingdome). “A Summerland,” perhaps one of my favorites in the collection, quotes John Constable: “I should paint my own places best.” How did you consider the Pacific Northwest, or the notion of ‘place’ more broadly, in the crafting of Cloud Builder?

Weston Morrow (WM): I consider the rendering of place somewhat similarly to how I consider the rendering of art through ekphrasis. To me, great ekphrasis isn’t about invoking the name of the painting and the poet’s response to the painting so much as invoking the effect of the painting. Like adapting a book to film, I think of ekphrasis as a project of translating some core element in the art itself that speaks to the poet into this new medium. Place is similar, I think. My goal when invoking place is not necessarily to describe a location and its effect on me so much as it is to render the feeling of that place for a reader. The names of plants or local businesses, the description of infrastructure—all these things we often associate with “place” in poetry—are not really meaningful in themselves. It’s the feelings they give rise to and the role they play in that place that matter. When we get together with old friends and reminisce, when we say, for instance, “Remember the old pub on Union and Rainier?” we are not really referencing the place itself so much as invoking a feeling and the role of that place in our lives. So, the role of place in these poems is similar to that. How do you say, to readers who were not there, remember the old pub on Union and Rainier? How do you craft the poem in such a way that when you invoke the name of the pub a reader who has never seen it has that feeling?

NM: I want to ask more specifically about the ekphrastic thread through the collection. You address John Constable and his work directly in poems sharing the title of some of his paintings, some poems speak from his grief-stricken yet hungry-for-depiction persona, and even in poems not ostensibly about Constable his voice or work creeps in for a line or two. Could you tell me a bit about why you are drawn to Constable’s art and biography and what Cloud Builder gains from his prominence in the poems?

WM: Regarding Constable, in particular, I felt we had a similar sense of artistic purpose—despite working in totally different media and being separated by two hundred years. I felt really strangely connected to him despite the vast gulf of time. I suspect that many of us have had this feeling through an encounter with the work of an artist who is long dead.

I’m really interested in the boundaries or limits of the self and where they come from. This notion of time and space as planes that separate events and entities is something I have been interested in for a long time, and these distinctions manifest very distinctly in how we talk about poetry vs. painting. We often talk of painting as a medium that works within the spatial mode, while we talk of poetry (traditionally) as working in the temporal mode. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing makes this kind of distinction in Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. But I am more interested in the blurring of these boundaries. So I was simultaneously considering the question of the self and the question of art, and how each is a construct erected with false boundaries. For instance, is it possible for poetry to break out of temporal confinement and play in space? I think the answer is obviously yes. There are so many incredible visual poems written in the last decade that exemplify this: Keith S. Wilson’s recent collection, Games for Children is just one great example. And is it also possible, then, for paintings to break out of spatial confinement and play across time? I think the answer to this is obviously yes as well. Part of our initial perception of a painting occurs in the moment of initial visual encounter, but we also experience it across time as our eye moves over it.

So, if poetry and painting are not so limited by time and space as we might initially suspect, then, is it not also possible that Constable and my self are not so limited by time and space either? I feel that the possibilities and limits of art are intermingled with the possibilities and limits of the self.

I think that writing in persona is very similar to acting. You are throwing yourself into the mindset of this character, but you are using your own experience to do so. There is a blurring effect that occurs in this process, as the actor and the subject start to blend together, and the boundaries of the self become blurry. The more time I spent in Constable’s letters and paintings, the more I felt this blur and the more I wanted to channel that feeling into the poems. So, whether I am writing in the persona of Constable, or the persona of myself, it’s always, ultimately, the same speaker. When I am writing a poem about my own childhood in Tacoma, Washington, I am channeling Constable’s art of place and thinking of his own desire to return, through his art, to the places of his past. And when I write in Constable’s voice, it’s my fear for my own wife’s health that animates his voice as he worries over Maria.

NM: Grief of person and place also feature prominently in the collection. Yet, the poems never feel sentimental or precious in their grief – grief is unpredictably located and rendered anew. What advice do you have for writers working in the elegiac mode? How can we write about grief, perhaps the oldest theme of art, in new ways?

WM: Everyone’s grief is unique. When we write about grief, we are not writing about grief. We are writing about our grief. We are not writing about loss but about what’s been lost.

NM: Speaking of advice, a more general question: what has been the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

WM: It’s hard to pick just one piece of advice, because sometimes the most impactful advice becomes so much a part of you that you forget it wasn’t always there, and I have been so lucky to receive incredible advice from so many brilliant writers and educators and friends. But one bit of advice that has meant a great deal to me came from Ángel García, who urged me to be more vulnerable. I think part of why this advice was so good is that it was specific to my needs as a poet at that time.

I think of Norm MacDonald’s observation that a comedian’s goal should be to be funny, whereas many comedians seem to want to be smart, and the funniness is almost just incidental. I have written many poems where I think I wanted to be smart, or clever, or righteous. I would not venture to say what a poet’s goal should be. I suspect that answer may be different for each of us, but I will say that none of those other things ever led me to a good poem. Vulnerability, I think, has.

NM: Another thread throughout the collection is technological mediation of experience. The speaker reflects on his child-self watching the implosion of the Kingdome on TV, he invents rituals of grief through typing dead family members’ names and simulating their lives in The Oregon Trail computer game, and a grown-up speaker scrolls forgotten photos on iCloud. Art, too, is a sort of technological mediation: the landscape painting or elegy poem standing between creator and experience. In a contemporary moment when technological mediation is becoming more and more prominent in discourse, what role does it play for you in the collection?

WM: I think it is absolutely inescapable. If you type the title of my book into Amazon, the top results include how-to books for building web infrastructure with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The digital cloud is all around us, and the corporeal world is almost completely intertwined now with the digital world. That blurring effect I spoke about earlier manifests here, as well; our digital selves and our physical selves blur and form a hybrid self. Our phones function as extensions of our bodies and minds and become integrated in our self conception. We feel phantom vibrations in our pockets like the tingling of a lost limb. For better or worse, the combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell and 7-Eleven are just as much “my places” as the Kingdome or the Narrows Bridge. I think many discussions of “place” in poetry reduce the concept of place to nature, but I am equally interested in built environments, and I’m especially interested in how a sense of place blossoms—like a flower growing in a sidewalk crack—in the placelessness of suburban America, amid all that sameness, all the parking lots and identical houses and chain restaurants. What does “place” mean in a world hybridized by the digital? What did it mean in the places I grew up, where the sameness of suburbia threatened the notion of place even before the specter of digital reproduction overwhelmed it?

NM: In writing the poems in this collection, I would imagine you had a few threads, imagistic touchstones, or forms in mind. However, the process of creating a manuscript always provides writers with surprises they couldn’t foresee, discoveries made about the book in the process of writing it. What surprised you most in the composition of Cloud Builder?

WM: In general, I try to avoid entering a poem with a structure in mind. I recognize that received form, like anything else, can be a constraint that creates new possibilities in a poem’s creation, but for the most part (when it comes to my own writing) I find received forms pretty unappealing. I find that when I try to write a poem within the confines of a received form there inevitably comes a moment where I have to make a choice between two options—one that gives precedence to the form, the other that gives precedence to the poem’s unique circumstances. I realize that marrying these two things is part of the difficulty and beauty of a well-written received-form poem, but I feel my impulse is always to let the poem lead me away from generic (in the sense of genre) paths, instead heading off in their own wild direction. The “Ars Poetica” in the collection considers this question, and relies on an epigraph from an 1836 lecture on painting by Constable, in which he said, “It is thus in all the fine arts. A new Gothic building, or a new missal, is in reality little less absurd than a new ruin.”

So, surprise is at the core of the whole enterprise, but, to be completely honest, what surprised me most in the creation of Cloud Builder was that my life could be worth writing about. For many years I didn’t think it was, and I think many people probably feel this way. It took the whole process of writing this book to realize that I was looking with all this intense curiosity at the world around me, but I had seemingly refused to turn that curiosity on the subject of my own life. What seemed to me as normal or boring was actually a result of this incuriosity and lack of practice I had in interrogating my life. The most “banal,” “normal” life can be rendered as incredibly interesting through writing, because good writing is a process of noticing the interesting elements, and organizing them, and then rendering them in an exciting manner. It took me many years to learn that it wasn’t my life that was boring, it was my lack of skill in looking and rendering my own life. That was a different skill from looking at the world around me and rendering that poetically, and the process of writing this book taught me that.

NM: Finally, Cloud Builder holds so many other voices in it: quotes from family members, but also from history, myth, references to other works of art. Which writers were most important to you as you were making Cloud Builder? Who or what are you reading now as you look ahead?

WM: I just read Natalie Shapero’s Stay Dead, which is absolutely brilliant, Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater, Annie Wenstrup’s The Museum of Unnatural Histories, Kathy Fagan’s The Unbecoming, Stanley Plumly’s collected poems that came out last year. These are some of the books that have grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me lately.

In terms of Cloud Builder, I think the list is almost too massive to begin…obviously Plumly and Keats and Auden and Williams and Rilke and Barthes are there all through the collection, but also Richard Siken and Louise Glück and Sharon Olds and Richard Hugo and James Wright and Joe Wilkins, as well as visual artists like Robert Irwin and, of course, JMW Turner, who was originally a key part of the manuscript, and whose specter, I suspect, still haunts the ellipses.

Other voices are central to the collection, in part, because I believe strongly in this blurring effect—that the self is a creation, less a thing and more a story we tell ourselves, or, as Daniel Dennett described it in 1986, a “center of narrative gravity.” The contemporary American mythos relies so much on the foregrounding of individuality and the self, and I want to push back—not only against this privileging of the self above others, but also against the very notion that the self is an entity truly distinct from others. Our selves arise only from relation to others—from the mimicking of language and behaviors of our parents or community, from the advice we receive and the ideas we glean from books and speeches and teachers, from the bonds of love we form with friends and partners. These voices do not shape us; they are us.

Clouds begin very simply—with a mote of dust. Slowly, water vapor condenses around it, enshrouding it, expanding outward ‘til it becomes a cloud. It’s not so much that water vapor reshapes the mote of dust. It becomes something altogether different, something greater.