Interview: Rich Ristow

Rich Ristow is a Rhysling Award-winning poet whose books include Into the Cruel Sea (Skullvines Press), Binge and Purge (Skullvines) and Wood Life: A Poem (Snuff Books).  He's edited the soon-to-be-released Death in Common: Poems from Unlikely Victims, and has plans for many other anthologies (Rich is the Managing Editor of the Needfire Poetry imprint of Belfire Press).  In 2004, he earned a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

This past week Rich graciously agreed to do an interview with Macabre Republic.  We discussed his own writerly and editorial projects, as well as his thoughts on the present state of the art of "horror" poetry.

Macabre Republic: Hello, Rich, and welcome to Macabre Republic.  I'd like to start by talking about your book-length poem, Wood Life.  I was really impressed by the range of the verse, in terms of the poetic modes adopted and structural patterns employed.  From section to section of the poem, the verse seemed as varied as the mental/emotional states of your tormented speaker.  How conscious were you of matching form to content in Wood Life?  Also, in terms of the composition process: did you find there are any special challenges in writing a book-length poem?

Rich Ristow: Charles Olson and Robert Creeley both believed that content is but an extension of form, and I have to agree 100%.  Basically, what you say and write is shaped by how you say or write it.  This is why, for example, a sonnet in iambic pentameter sounds absolutely different than the drunken free verse of Charles Bukowski; one sounds lofty and elevated, and the other like the guy sitting one bar stool over--and I'm not saying that one is better than the other.  Poetic forms are basically tools to achieve a desired end.  For example, one wouldn't use a scalpel to do the job of a hacksaw; so, one wouldn't write a villanelle to achieve the minimalist juxtaposition of haiku, senryu, and tanka.

That's a wordy preamble to my answer, filled with name dropping, I know.  However, it's what was going through my mind when writing Wood Life.  Psychology is messy at times, and I wanted the form to be as fragmented and unpredictable as the speaker's psychosis and moral crisis.  So some days, he thinks linear, which translates into ordinary lines, and other days, the writing scatters across the page in a jumbled mess with gaps and blank spots.  This is also why the book looks so rough with orphaned lines carrying over to blank pages, a few typos, and incorrect capitalization.  The challenge, however, is to not only capture this sort of chaotic mind onto paper, but to also make it readable to a general reader.  A lot of postmodernist poetry, while wonderful and challenging, will not appeal to the average genre fiction fan.  It will appeal to people like myself, who have spent many years studying poetry, and that's about it.  So it was something I spent a lot of time thinking about, and in organizing the book, I tried to keep most of the sections slightly different than what came before.

As for the composition process, it's the same as fiction.  Every story and novel poses special challenges, as does composing poems and fashioning them into a sequence.  And, of course, not every long poem is the same.  I would never dare compare Wood Life to Anne Carson or A.R. Ammons, but I've read plenty of both writers.  I bring them up because they seem to be polar opposites in the spectrum of book-length poems.  Carson's Autobiography of Red reads like a novella with characters (a gay dragon), while Ammons's Garbage reads like an extended meditation or poetic essay with line breaks.  And in that, there's the never-ending debate within poetry: narrative versus lyric.  I chose to go with a more narrative arc, because if you're going to try something as challenging as trying to sell poetry to horror readers, you have to meet them halfway.  It's a case of trying to anticipate who your readers might be and write towards their inclinations.  I seriously doubt a lot of readers would pick up Ammons's Garbage or Tape for the Turn of the Year.  And that gets back to one of my primary aims: doing something fragmented and chaotic, but keeping it accessible to any reader.

As for the nuts and bolts of the proces, it was a case of writing the middle parts while figuring out the beginning and the end.  Much of the book was written last year, but to meet a deadline I cannibalized bits from my not-functional MFA thesis (a novel-in-verse that failed miserably in its narrative execution) and tailored them to fit.

MR: Could you talk about what went into the creation of your speaker, the haunted predator Daniel David Silvestre?  Did you have any particular models, literary or otherwise, for this harrowing figure?

RR: Chronologically speaking, Silvestre was the third serial killer I created.  The others being Charles Lee Eaton of Death in Common and Jean-Pierre Fluerry of a novelette (Binge) Skullvines Press will release next year, in a short story collection called Strange Latitudes.  Off the top of my head, there are no literary models that I consciously followed (So, alas, no, I didn't think of Robert Bloch or Norman Bates once, but there's always the uncontrollable subconscious at work, so who knows?).  In terms of speaking voice, the two poets I consulted the most were Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  Also, I've always had a fascination with mental illness, which was intensified, in part, from the times I've worked with developmentally delayed schizophrenics in a group home setting.  I have adult ADHD, which I take medication for, but it was undiagnosed at the time of writing--part of the challenge was also channeling the terrible sense of disorganization I've struggled with most of my life.  But I've always wanted to get the psychology correct, too.  The challenge is to avoid common tropes, stereotypes, and what Carlton Mellick III would derisively call "weirdness for the sake of weirdness."  That said, I have read psychological theories behind serial killing, in terms of patterns and proven chains-of-behavior.  Most times, I just tried to stay true to that.  Also, forget writing handbooks and "You Can Write Too!" ejaculatory manifestos.  One of the most valuable resources a horror writer could ever have is the DSM-IV.

MR: The anthology that you've edited, Death in Common: Poems from Unlikely Victims, offers a modern horror riff on a classic work of American Gothic poetry--Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.  What was it that drew you to Masters's work as a formal model?

RR: I liked the interconnectedness of Spoon River, in how it all weaved together through epitaphs-as-poems.  Plus, if you're trained to think of poetry and writing on a formal level, it gives a distinct structure to build an idea for a book around.  But on a more intrinsic note, Masters was more concerned with the lives of people than beating a political or aesthetical drum, and that appealed to me more than anything.  One tires very quickly of ham-fisted debates about prosody, and self-conscious drivel masquerading as "Verse," whether neo-formalist or avant garde, which will always be navel-gazing crap unless you have the talent of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, or John Berryman.  Sure, Spoon River Anthology is about a bunch of tombstones in a graveyard, but it's imbued with a real sense of humanity--lives lived and lost.  It's hard not to find that compelling.

However, this also gets into one other subject.  Wood Life and Death in Common share a fundamental conceit: there's a fake "article" at the beginning of both books.  It's there to set the thematic/conceptual framework.  A friend (and a good writer) once asked me how I had come up with that construction, and I had to remind her that I actually created nothing new.  Framing devices are as old as literature--Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's The Decameron are essentially story collections, but the frame, or rather the overlapping story, is what glues everything together.

I'm also interested in something I call "Fakelore" or "hoax-lore"--made-up studies of made-up folklore/urban legend.  Death in Common claims to be transcripts of paper found in the mouths of murder victims; Wood Life claims to be a scribbled notebook found in the woods of northern West Virginia.  I've also written drafts of stories that claim to be a collection of psychotic letters-to-the-editor (with footnotes!) as well as fake oral histories.  Both of those manuscripts have never been polished up and sent out for submission, by the way.  Presently, of a couple of works in progress, I'm writing a fake art catalog for a fictional surrealist painter.  I'm especially going to need that framing faux-news-article preface to explain why there are no photo reproductions in the book (all the art was destroyed in a fire).  In the end, it all comes back to the different shapes of writing.  I think that's something that all my years of studying poetry ingrained in me.

MR: I figure you're the perfect person to ask to address the current state of horror poetry.  Are there any recent trends that you've noted?  Anything that you wish you'd see more/less of?

RR: There is one trend that annoys me more than anything.  Many people within the genre, and outside of it and across the Internet, claim to write poetry, but obviously never buy it or read it on a regular basis.  These are the types who bemoan "society turning its back on poetry" but do not even know that a big press like Penguin or Scribners still actively publishes contemporary work.  I should be frank: I'm about to start sounding like a raving asshole in a moment (If I haven't already!).  However, if you claim to be a "serious" poet, and you don't know that Scribners' Year's Best American Poetry actually exists, then your credibility takes a deep nose dive.  And sadly, that's the case of poetry in the horror genre--writers who think that Percy Shelley or Wordsworth or Keats are "contemporary" and choose to write like them or solicit work in that antiquated mode or language.  And if you're writing gothy couplets that make ample ample use of 'tis or 'twas or o'er, don't complain when actual poetry readers laugh at you.  A friend of mine once got a rejection from a horror website that read, "Your poem failed to evoke emotion; therefore it fails as a poem."  I told him to be glad he received a rejection and to cross them off his list of viable markets.  The editor in question does not know what he's talking about.

After all, poetry is not about emotion.  It's not about one's "Self" or "soul" either.  Sure, poetry can have elements of that, but it's not the defining quality.  Poetry is art where language is the medium.  Just like how painting is an art of applying color to a surface.  Nobody seriously interested in the visual arts would ever look at the lines and squares in a Piet Mondrian painting, or the splatters of Jackson Pollock, and go, "You failed to evoke emotion; therefore your work fails as a painting."  Yet that simple truth is lost on so many people.  So, my advice?  Read.  Everything.  Read everything from contemporary free verse to the neo-formalists writing in metrics to language poets like Ron Silliman or poets interested in Oulipo constraints, like Harryette Mullen.  So, this goes without saying--put down the Edgar Allan Poe collection for a moment, and pick up somebody like Sylvia Plath, Frank Bidart, or Stephen Dobyns.  Pick up Scribners' Year's Best American Poetry--any year will do.  Contemporary poetry is already conditioned for imagery of the fantastic and macabre, and it's not that hard to find.  I should also say that I'm not disparaging the value of Edgar Allan Poe, either.

On that note, the best book of "contemporary horror poetry" I've ever read has to be Christopher Conlon's Starkweather Dreams (although, if you were to ask Conlon if he's a "horror poet," his answer likely would be "absolutely not!").  That's followed--and closely, I might add--by Michael Arnzen's Gorelets.  Bryan Dietrich--I'd feel kind of weird plugging him this way, partly because I'm editing two of his books for Belfire Press, and I have a stake in his work doing well.  Beyond that, like Conlon, horror is a temporary stopping point for Dietrich.  Sure, he may return to the genre again, but his aesthetic interests also lay outside the genre, too (And kudos to him for getting a poem into The New Yorker that employs the word "Sleestak").  T.M. Wright should write and publish more poetry, too.  And perhaps someday, I can verbally twists his arm into doing so!

That said, I think poetry is the same as fiction in one regard.  A keen sense of humanity can go a very long way.  Just ask Edgar Lee Masters.

MR: You've already begun to answer this above, but who are some of the writers (classic or contemporary) of horror/Gothic poetry that you would recommend to readers?

RR: Sylvia Plath, without question.  There are some great Eastern European poets in translation, like Tomaz Salamun, Aleksander Ristovic, and Ruxandra Cereseanu.  I also think Paul Celan's poem "Death Fugue" should be required reading for anyone who wants to write horror poetry.  In my mind, it's one of the most devastating poems ever written in any language.  Also, one can go pretty much anywhere...Want to read poetry with hints of "bizarro" lit?  Charles Simic, Russel Edson, James Tate.  It really goes to my previous answer.  There's so much worthwhile material being written outside of the label "horror," much like there's a lot of horrific fiction that doesn't wear the "horror" brand on its book spine.

MR: You are also the author of the novella Into the Cruel Sea.  First, if you would, tell us a little about that narrative.  And as a follow-up: do you feel that there any distinct differences between writing horror fiction and horror poetry, or is the approach essentially the same?

RR: It's a story about an abused teenager who's confronted with a terrible choice.  Her boyfriend and father are monsters in both literal and figurative senses.  It's also a story I wrote after reading Brian Keene's Ghoul.  The comparisons might be inevitable.  So it's heavy in 1980's pop culture, but it's also set on a U.S. Navy base in Bermuda, where I lived for three years.

I am a Third-Culture American.  That is, I was born on a U.S. Air Force base in what used to be West Germany during the Cold War, and I grew up overseas, moving roughly every three years.  My father and mother weren't in the military, but worked for the Department of Defense as primary and secondary school educators.  I grew up with the alienation of being a foreigner in foreign lands, in a microcosm of American society that didn't accept me.  I was a civilian dependent in a military world.  I grew up feeling like an outsider in every community I tried to be a part of.  When I returned stateside permanently for college and adult life, that feeling never went away.  It's very much part of who I am.  I've never felt like I'm fully "American" and I've never felt like I'm "European."  I'm something else, something other that slips between the cracks of everybody's expectations.  Plus, the landscape of my childhood is gone, bulldozed.  After the Soviet Union fell apart and the Cold War ended, President Clinton downsized the military, and a lot of bases I lived near or visited regularly have been shut down with the land returned to the respective host nations.  I have no home town in the United States, either.  Some people can take a car trip or a plane ride if they ever get struck by nostalgic pangs.  I cannot.  And I'm not alone, either.  My personal story is not unique, as it's something any military/diplomatic brat my age would know very well--which is why I openly embrace "Third-Culture" as my cultural identity.  It's a phenomenon that's been widely written about, when it comes to the children of Americans abroad.  (And, as a side note: Third Culture silently dominated the last Presidential race, with one candidate who was born in Panama, and the other who spent a few years of his childhood living in Indonesia).  This is something that I've tried to capture in fiction.  Beth Weller in Into the Cruel Sea lives in a world that doesn't accept her on her own terms.  This is something she must learn for herself; she must decide what her terms are, and demand them of the world (And, in the process, she does have sex with a fish monster!).  And here's a cheap plug: the story is now available in a Kindle edition, and in other e-book formats at the Merchant's Keep webstore.

In the end, I approach writing fiction and poetry the same way.  How much can I cut from a rough draft?  How much cna I say with as few words as possible?  How much can I rely on a vivid sense of image to do the storytelling?

MR: Lastly, can you share any news about whatever projects (personal or editorial) you are working on now?

RR: For Belfire/Needfire, I'm editing a book of poetry by Barry Napier at the moment.  Barry's a very talented guy.  He has a keen sense of vivid imagery, a strong voice, and an innate sense of creativity that's just compelling.  Belfire also has a book of Asian-formalist-influenced poetry from Wrath James White coming up, which hopefully will be released by the time KillerCon takes place in Las Vegas.  So that has me excited.  And there's always the third attempt to release Death in Common, which will be the inaugural volume of Belfire's new Needfire poetry imprint.  The proof copy should be here any day now.  Needfire also has books by Bryan Dietrich coming up next year, one of which details fatherhood and growing up watching Star Trek, while the other delves into the psyche of Frankenstein's monster.  Again, I'm really excited for both.  And last, on the Needfire/Belfire front, I'm about to delve back into editing an anthology of Ezra Pound/Imagist-inspired ghost poetry.  I'm still taking submissions on that, actually, although I had to put slush reading on hold temporarily to finish some other projects with looming deadlines.  Submission info can be found on the Needfire section of the Belfire website.  Also, I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't say: I'm very happy to be working with Jodi Lee, Louise Bohmer, and Bob Freeman.  I could really learn a lot from those folks and their collected experiences in small press publishing.

Outside of Belfire, next year will see Strange Latitudes from Skullvines Press.  It's going to repackage Into the Cruel Sea into a collection of previously unpublished tales about Bermuda.  That includes a novelette duo Skullvines contracted as Binge and Purge, as well as a chapbook called The Sorrow of Young Caliban, which was going to be published by Bandersnatch Books before...well...um...no comment.  There will be some other stuff thrown in for good measure, and all of it will be horror set in the Atlantic sub-tropics.

MR: I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for these books. Thank you, Rich, for taking the time out to speak to Macabre Republic.

RR: And thank you for the time and interest.  Best of luck with this blog, as it's been a very fun read so far!