An Exuberant Conversation with Kevin Prufer
Kevin Prufer is an American poet, editor, and essayist. He is also a Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He has published poems, essays, and reviews in literary journals and magazines, including The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, A Public Space, AGNI, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, and The Best American Poetry (2020). His honors include five Pushcart Prizes, and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, The Lannan Foundation, and other organizations. His first book, Strange Wood, received the 1997 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize (formerly the Winthrop Prize). He has also been awarded a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry.
Kevin's upcoming poetry collection, The Fears, is coming in 2023 from Copper Canyon Press. He also has a new novel called Sleepaway, coming in 2024 from Acre Books.
I had the honor and pleasure of asking Kevin what makes a great line in a poem, why he became a professor, and so much more.
UZOMAH: How did you become Co-Curator of The Unsung Masters Series?
KEVIN: A student had given my friend Doug (D. A.) Powell a copy of a book called Lament for the Sleepwalker by the then-forgotten poet Dunstan Thompson. I’ll never forget hearing Doug read those poems to me over the phone – strange, homoerotic, violent poems done in intricate, rhythmic forms. Thompson had been a GI in WWII, and Doug and I set out to learn more about him, to find him, and, eventually, to edit a volume of what we’d call his Complete Poems. But we needed permission from a literary executor, and ran into many obstacles … and, when we finally found that executor, he told us that the poems could never be reprinted, that in the late 1940s, Dunstan Thompson had reinvigorated his Catholicism and renounced his earlier, clearly gay poems.
This would have meant the end of our project had another friend, Dana Gioia, not intervened, convincing the literary executor of the value of the poetry to the world and the virtue of publishing the earlier poems alongside Thompson’s later devotional work.
Eventually, we were allowed to republish about fifty pages of Thompson’s work, not enough for a full-length book. But Doug and I had learned so much interesting stuff about Thompson along the way that we decided to do a book about him, a book that would collect the poems we were allowed to publish and print them alongside biographical essays, interviews (with the executor, etc.), photographs, and ephemera.
And our friend Dana, who was then the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, offered us funding to print the book and distribute it as widely as we could.
So was born the Unsung Masters Series, which has only grown in the last fifteen years. Each year, we publish another book on the same model as the Thompson volume, devoted to another great but forgotten author of the past.
U: What poetry collection would you suggest to a young poet who wants to start writing poetry?
K: I think Larry Levis’ Selected Poems is a terrific book for a young poet to read and use as a model. Levis’ attention to the primacy of the image, his nuanced and complex story-telling, his refusal to reduce complex ideas into simplicity –—his love of emotional and intellectual complexity—make him ideal. More than that, Levis is a truly accessible, moving, often fun poet, a poet I’ve returned to again and again over the three decades since I first encountered him.
U: What is your fondest memory of a teacher that inspired you to be a writer and educator?
K: Most of my memories of teachers are a little bit harrowing, moments when teachers told me things I didn’t want to hear, things that made me angry – though, in retrospect, they turned out to be right and helpful. So I’m having a hard time with the word “fondest” here – not that I don’t have fond memories of certain teachers, but that those memories are amorphous and a bit boring.
I remember coming to one teacher, Eric Trethewey, and showing him a poem by a college friend named Rick Barot. It was an amazing poem published prominently, and I told Dr. Trethewey that I was envious of Rick and that I didn’t think I could ever be that good. Dr. Trethewey answered me too quickly: “Well, it’s clear that your friend Rick has a voice, something you don’t yet have.” Of course, this angered me. I wanted to protest, to say, “I do have a voice; you just can’t hear it!” I think I didn’t look Dr. Trethewey in the eye for a good week or two after he said that.
In retrospect, though, he was right. I didn’t yet dare to have a voice. I was trying to write like everyone else, to please everyone, because that felt good, like success. I wanted no one to object to my poems in class, confusing an unobjectionable poem with a good poem.
But eventually, I got up the courage to write like myself, and now, looking back on it, Eric Trethewey’s admonition probably helped me to do that, helped me to ask myself what my own voice might sound like. (And I’m still frequently jealous of Rick Barot’s poems and always will be.)
U: Your new novel Sleepaway, will appear in 2024 from Acre Books; what makes the novel process different from writing poetry?
K: A world of difference! There are fewer tools available to fiction writers than are available to poets, and at first, I found writing the novel to be stultifying and strange. How could I write without line breaks, white space, silence, caesura, or the intricacies of the poetic line? Those are, for a poet, the most powerful tools. When I began the novel, it felt like building a house without nails. Or a hammer.
But then the process grew on me, the way a restriction in art can be not a restraint but a catalyst. I began to enjoy the leisure of the paragraph, like an open field of words rolling on and on. I got interested in the nuances of character, which in poetry, I’d always had to sketch out quickly. I got to explore the characters’ backgrounds, their sources, and contexts and loves and hatreds.
After a couple of weeks, I found myself thinking about those characters all day long, then returning to my desk at night to write for hours.
It’s a strange little science fiction novel set in the rural Midwest some decades ago, and in the end, I felt like I’d invented a town and people I was sorry to have to let go.
U: Do you see yourself as more of a storyteller or a wordsmith?
K: A storyteller, for sure.
All of my poems these days begin with the question, “What if this were to happen?” And then I follow that question along as I write—whether in fiction or poetry—until I come to an end, or to another story that’s worth following for a while. I love the idea that a poem might be more than carefully wrought words, that it might have something to say, a history to recount, and that poems and stories might share a great deal, even if the tools available to the fiction writer are different (and perhaps more limited) than the tools available to a poet.
This isn’t to say that there’s no “smithing” going on in a poem. Of course, there is—,but I tend to find that in the revision process, where I ask myself, “What else is going on here beyond the story that gave the piece birth?” It’s then that I begin cutting away, sculpting, thinking about rhythm and affect and allusion and, most of all, music.
U: Has there ever been a moment when you didn’t want to share one of your poems with someone because it felt too personal or intimate?
K: Not really. I find it very hard to write about myself in poems and much more interesting to write about other people, imagined people. There’s a lot of freedom in that—in the idea that the world of the not-me is much greater and more interesting than the world of the me.
This isn’t to say that I don’t exist in my poems. I do, of course: my cares, concerns, ideas, and context. But the illusion that I don’t exist is both freeing and helps me avoid a kind of intimacy that I find unproductive and uncomfortable.
U: You also have a new selection of poems coming out in 2023 called, The Fears from Copper Canyon Press; after writing several poetry collections, how do you stay active in the creative form of poetry?
K: My greatest worry is that my next book will be a bad version of my previous book, and that I’ll start imitating myself. This might be unfounded, but at the same time, I can think of many poets who have fallen into this trap, poets I stop reading after a while because they seem to revisit the same territory, imagery, and verbal strategies again and again.
To avoid this, I come up with a non-poetry writing project after I’ve finished a book of poems, a way of washing the old voice out of my system so a new voice can come to me. In the past, this has included writing mystery stories for various pulp magazines or editorial projects, like New European Poets or Into English: Poems, Translations Commentaries, and big projects that I do in cooperation with other editors and writers. Or the forthcoming novel.
U: What makes a good line in a poem?
K: Oh, so many things! A good line of poetry depends upon itself, but also upon how it is situated among other lines of poetry. I could write a book on this question alone.
But here’s just one example: I think that a good line of poetry might be thought of as having four separate parts.
The first part is the first half of the line and the second part is the second half of the line. The second half of the line might echo, rhythmically, the first half: “whose woods these are / I think I know,” for instance. This idea that a line might have two halves builds balance, echo, and, across many lines, music.
The third part of the line is the not-much-remarked-upon silence between the first half and the second half—a kind of quick pause, a silent beat, a tiny breath. The fourth part is the longer silence at the end of the line, before the next line begins.
In this way, a rhythm of silences might also be created across lines: short pause, long pause, short pause, long pause, etc. And the rhythm of silences works alongside or in counterpoint to the more traditional rhythm created by the words themselves, the iambs, or, perhaps, the less conventional rhythm of free verse.
Often, when a line looks dead on the page, I ask myself: does it have the four parts? Might it have them?
Of course, this isn’t the only strategy for creating a good line, but it’s one of them, and a good one. It greats complex rhythms that work simultaneously and open themselves up to interesting variations.
U: Do you have to figure out the meaning of a poem, or should it just be felt?
K: I believe that a bad way to teach poetry is to tell students that a poem is like a code, and the job of the reader is to crack it. Or a poem is like a puzzle that needs to be solved.
Who would want to crack the same code twice? Once you solve a puzzle, why solve it again?
Rather, I believe that a good poem is often an urgent act of thought and feeling and, usually, communication. The poem is thinking about something complex and important. It feels conflicted, perhaps. As a reader, you get to think about that complex and important thing along with the poem; you get to feel conflicted, too. A good poem engages a reader in complex thought, complex feeling, the combination of the two.
So I’d say a good poem should be felt and thought, but probably not figured out.
U: Why did you become a professor?
K: I became a professor because I love teaching. I was going to be a high school teacher, but college teaching fell into my lap, and now I teach undergraduates and very sophisticated graduate students. I love to get up, drive to campus, and talk about what I love with people who love it, too, and want to know more about it. It’s as simple as that.
For more information about Kevin’s writing and new works, please visit his site.
