Jim Natal: You studied geology as an undergrad at William & Mary and you’re still out there exploring the fissures and crevices of the San Andreas Fault. How does Earth Science with its strata, core samples, tectonic plate shifts, and geologic time inform your poetry? Do these concepts and references just show up unannounced like a temblor while you’re writing?
Forrest Gander: Funny you should mention geological fissures. For the last two days, I’ve been in the Mono Lake area, east of Yosemite National Park. It’s worthwhile to look up a photo of Mono Lake online. A terminal lake with white, cauliflower-textured tufa columns towering over its surface, it resembles one of those fantasy landscapes—do you remember the early YES album covers—painted by Roger Dean? In any case, behind and above Mono Lake, my partner and I explored the Black Point Fissures, dramatic canyon-sized slots in an uplifted volcanic dome. Geology helped train my sight. It taught me to correlate large scale features—say, a range of mountains—with small scale features—microscopic views of the crystals in a shear zone, for instance. It takes more than one view to comprehend what you are looking at.
JN: You once mentioned in an interview that the geology of the earth is erotic.” How so?
FG: Maybe I said that I think the language of geology is erotic. I love the gorgeous textures of geological words: Anglo-Saxon words like slab-gap and cleavage for instance; a Celtic word like crag; blende from the German for dazzle. And, of course, the many Latinate words like ontogeny, subduction, etc. Especially in a time when our lexicon is often reduced to sound bites, quotidian tropes, 280- character tweets, etc., I’m excited by poetry’s capacity to expand and renew our language by drawing from a wide range of sources.
JN: Speaking of your college days, one professor in particular did not offer much encouragement for your writing. More than a dozen books, a Pulitzer Prize, and an array of other prestigious awards later, we can safely say you’ve proven him wrong. Can you explain what it was that made you persist as a writer?
FG: Alas, that professor, Dr. Jenkins, was dead on. I thought I was a hotshot poet in my freshman year at William & Mary, but I hadn’t been reading much contemporary poetry beyond Dylan Thomas and Carl Sandburg. After David Jenkins’ honest, withering critique, I started voraciously reading contemporary poetry, and I signed up for a poetry workshop taught by Peter Klappert, a Yale Younger Poets Prize winner. He was the first living poet I’d met, and his seriousness about the art was influential. But you never really know about the quality of your work, do you? The prizes aren’t necessarily indicative of anything but moments of good luck. Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins went unrecognized and unrewarded in their time. Longfellow was the most popular poet in the English-speaking world for a while. Robinson Jeffers appeared on the cover of Time magazine and was lionized in portraits and busts by dozens of major sculptors and photographers. Few people read Longfellow or Jeffers anymore (although I do re-read and admire Jeffers’ work). You don’t know. You struggle on. I try not to repeat myself. I imagine every artist thinks, like me, that their next work is going to outshine anything they’ve done before. For me, it’s the shrapnel of hope more than faith or assurance that drives me.
JN: During the conversation portion of a Lannan Foundation program you did with your close friend, poet Arthur Sze, you say that asking “Why not?” is the “beginning of all good art.” What “why not” questions have you asked yourself as your literary career has progressed?
FG: Why not incorporate vocabulary from nontraditional sources like geology or physics into poetry? Why not risk writing about encounters with the foreign? There are serious aesthetic and ethical reasons, in both those cases, for why it might be better not to go there. In Mojave Ghost, my new book, maybe I come close to formulating my reasons for taking those risks when I write, “Only when we reach the edges of experience/ do we begin to intuit the more-than-this.”
JN: With your late wife, the poet C. D. Wright, you were co-editor of Lost Roads Publishers. With the recent closure of a mainstay small press distributor and the burgeoning squeeze—particularly on new writers—to print and distribute their work through Amazon, plus the consolidation of major publishing houses internationally, what do you see as the future of independent publishing.
FG: What’s the future of any book publishing? Are most of the major New York publishing houses, as they dump their older editors, also weaning themselves of “the literary” in order to score bigger markets? Will there be books in fifty years? My son, in his mid-thirties, thinks not. A headline in The New York Times this morning announces “A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles with Math.” I’m no good with predictions. I’m devoted to something that has value to me, whether or not there is a place for it in our rapidly changing culture. I know others who feel the same way. Maybe the fact that poetry has, for the most part, always existed outside the market economy bodes well for its place in the future. I think there will always be people who consider poetry—written by people—important, even critical to human experience. In an interview, Raúl Zurita once said to me, “Because it is what opposes death, poetry is the hope of what has no hope. It is the possibility of what has absolutely no possibility. It is the love of what has no love. Like death, poetry was born with the human and will die when the last of our kind contemplates the last sunset.”
JN: Mojave Ghost, your new book, is difficult to categorize. You subtitle it a “A Novel Poem” and it is that on many levels and shades of meaning. It’s a book-length poem that has a novel-like arc and a narrative, discursive style. And it has a novel (as in unusual) fragmentary, short chapter structure. How did you decide to present this material in such a way? What freedoms—or restrictions—did it grant?
FG: Like you, I’ve been open to formal changes in my work. In Mojave Ghost, I wanted to write about the complexities of intimacy in the most direct way possible, without the lyricism, the energized and counterpointed music of my recent books. I’ve felt devastated by the successive recent deaths of my wife, CD Wright, my mother (who raised me and my sisters by herself), and my younger sister with whom I was inordinately close. Those deaths have shattered me and staggered my thinking, my feeling, my language. I found I could only write in fragments, in stages, stutters. But at the same time that I began this book, I fell into a profound, loving relationship, now a marriage, with the sculptor Ashwini Bhat. But my happiness was torn open by my grief. My consciousness felt ripped into a present and a past that I couldn’t distinguish from each other. I started to speak to and experience myself in the second and third person. Our country is increasingly divided politically. Having moved back to California where I’d been born and where I’ve been trying to ground myself in the landscape again, I began, with nonstrategic and nonliterary intentions, to hike along the length of the San Andreas fault. All those churning, contrary forces reshaped me and my writing.
JN: The book also is an unabashed love letter to your beloved intertwined with reflections on your relationship and your signature keen natural observations, many dealing with the Mojave Desert environment where you were born. The desert can be a place of exile and wandering, a spare landscape where mystics and prophets seek enlightenment or are tested. In Mojave Ghost it serves as a place to re-assess, to question oneself under the glare of the sun. You write: “When you go still, what has disappeared comes forward.” Is being in nature meditation for you?
FG: Yes. And I’d note that your own work also often counterpoints the non-human world with the technological and constructed world.
JN: Also threading through the book’s fragments, the connective veins so to speak, is an ongoing dialectical self-examination, a confrontation with what you’ve called “the skip at the center of ourselves.” Is Mojave Ghost a summing-up or more a state-of-the-self report?
FG: A “state-of-the-self report”? Yes, if the self is considered to be—as it is in your books too—the complex of our intimate engagements with others, and with place, and with the multiple selves that compose and complicate what we call our own identities.
JN: To continue on a similar track, a recurring theme in your work is the meaning of a well-lived life. Reminiscent of Rilke’s “You must change your life” and James Wright’s “I have wasted my life,” in Mojave Ghost your childhood self asks, “What have you done with your life?”; your adult self later questions, “How do you answer for your existence?” This echoes what you previously posed in the poem “What it Sounds Like” from your collection Be With: “You who were given a life, what did you make of it?” Are these questions that the living can truly—or fully—answer?
FG: I guess I think that when anyone—scientist, poet, stevedore, or philosopher—thinks they have truly and fully answered that question, or really any question, they only show that they have little sense of history. Of their own history or the history of the world’s so-called truths. And yet the questions we ask of ourselves are precisely what orient us toward the meaning of our lives.
JN: Along with your own much-lauded poetry, you are an esteemed translator of global poets, including Pablo Neruda. You’ve called the act of translation “The deepest kind of reading and also the deepest kind of listening to the music in someone else’s mind.” You also quote jazz legend Miles Davis, who maintained: “You have to listen into, not to.” What was your impetus to translate the work of poets from other cultures? Why do you think their voices need to be shared with what you’ve termed “an American ear and audience”?
FG: There’s of course a rich body of literature that we inherit as speakers of English. And then there’s another reservoir of capital, the coin that enables us to travel across borders. I would be impoverished had I never been able to read contemporaries such as Laszlo Krasznahorkai (in Ottilie Mulzet’s translation) or Inger Christensen (in Susanna Nied’s translation) or Clarice Lispector (in Idra Novey’s translation). The first book I fell in love with was a child’s book of fairy tales from different cultures. And when I’ve been utterly knocked out by great writing in the Spanish language—Jaime Saenz, Coral Bracho, Antonio Gamoneda, Zurita—I’ve felt driven to champion that work to others in my own translations. It’s commonly noted that the percentage of books in translation in the United States is much smaller than in other countries, and that fact may speak to a sense of self-satisfaction that I’ve never felt. Throughout history, English has been enlivened and transformed by translations. They refresh the gene pool of our language. On a selfish level, perhaps, I’ve always wanted to know what’s going on in my art in other places.
JN: You’ve translated poets whose work embodies disparate poetic traditions. And you’ve written extensively about the art, process, and challenges of translation. How has your translation work affected or influenced your own poetry?
FG: The influence has been considerable. There’s no closer kind of reading than in the act of translation when you hope to come as near as possible to hearing the music of someone else’s mind. That sort of highly intensive attunement can heighten your fluency with syntactical, lexical, imagistic, and rhythmic techniques that weren’t a part of your own poetics. So while translating, your own wingspan often broadens. It’s sometimes the poets most distinct from you who have the most to offer you. For instance, in translating the work of Gozo Yoshimasu, I came to appreciate experientially how his poems function more as core samples—studies in depth—than, say, landscapes. Rather than unfolding horizontally like stories and generating accumulative rhythms, Gozo’s poems keep drilling down through his starting material. Instead of writing “I met a cinematographer, and we walked to the river,” he’ll consider that it’s ethically important to qualify every term. Who is “I” and what was “I” doing earlier that day? What kind of mood was “I” in? Where did the meeting take place, in what month, at what precise time? What associations with that particular place does the poet keep in mind? What kind of regard does the speaker have for the cinematographer? Etc. The poem builds vertical volume instead of span or traditional plot. This slows the pacing down, which is a risky thing to do. But it’s a risk that can bring unusual rewards.
Translating Mexican poet Coral Bracho, on the other hand, helped to teach me how to trust and to lean more often on musical rather than semantic meanings. Although I have mono-focus and can only work on one thing at a time, either a translation or my own writing, the two constantly inflect on each other.
JN: Translation is collaboration between you and the poet you’re translating as well as with your co-translators. You’re also involved in a number of interdisciplinary collaborations. What is the appeal of such collaborations?
FG: As a lifelong endeavor, I continue to collaborate with artists from other mediums. For me, collaboration models a social mode—cooperation, mutual inspiration, a release of the need for total control, and orientation by process—to which I aspire. I’ve always been drawn—as an admirer—to other arts. Most recently, I’ve collaborated with the Swiss-American photographer Lukas Felzmann on a book titled Across Ground. He took photographs of the ground in all fifty-eight counties of California. In the short poems I wrote for each photograph, I respond to the images and also to the geology and topography of the locality. In some ways, this book is just the opposite of my recent collaboration with Jack Shear in the book Knot. In Jack’s photographs, there is only the naked human body wrestling with a large black cloth in a place with no background, no landscape. In a separate project related to my collaboration with Felzmann’s photographs of California’s ground, I’ve been hiking along the eight-hundred-mile length of the San Andreas fault with Ashwini Bhat. In Los Angeles, the Shoshana Wayne gallery curated one exhibition, “In Your Arms I’m Radiant,” of this ongoing collaboration featuring Bhat’s sculptures and my text.
JN: So much of your work is in dialogue with nature, infused with natural references; you’ve even written a poem in the voice of lichen. In the final section of Mojave Ghost, you dangle your feet over a fissure of an earthquake fault. You’ve commented that the San Andreas Fault is a perfect metaphor for poetry in our time.
FG: Yes, I’ve been focused—by inclination—on environmental and ecological concerns throughout my life. I grew up in a time of major ecological crisis and my concerns, since childhood, have often been focused on the relationship between the human and the non-human. With regard to the San Andreas Fault, I think I said that I’ve been thinking of it as a metaphor not necessarily for the poetry of our time, but for our time (and my poetry). The tumultuous political divisions that define the United States and many other countries now, the rift between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, the reflexive philosophical and religious assumptions regarding the privileged place of human beings relative to everything else have, together, created a shear zone, a troubled and dangerous fricative landscape akin to an enormous fault running through our world. In my case, I have to add my own subjective experience of rift—between grief and happiness, between the presence of the living and the presence of the dead, and between the multiple selves that constantly argue over who I am.
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Forrest Gander, born in the Mojave Desert, lives in California. A translator/writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s received the Pulitzer Prize and Best Translated Book Award, among many other honors. Gander’s has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His book Twice Alive focuses on human and ecological intimacies. In 2024, New Directions brought out his long poem on the desert, Mojave Ghost: a Novel-Poem.
Jim Natal is the author of the forthcoming Everything Changes Everything, the chapbook Étude in the Form of a Crow, and five full-length poetry collections including Spare Room: Haibun Variations and Memory and Rain. His work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. A multi-year Pushcart Prize nominee and a long-time literary presenter, he is the co-founder of Conflux Press in Los Angeles.