interview by Ken L. Walker

Do you think that it (Archicembalo) feels overintellectualized, dense with tough glass to break — and simultaneously funny, lighthearted?

My original arts background, such as it was, was not in creative writing or literature.  I studied voice and conducting as an undergraduate (focusing on early music) and considered going on for graduate work in conducting.  I didn’t–this is another story–but once I began writing poetry I realized how thoroughly musical ideas of form and structure pervaded what I was trying to do, what I thought art of any sort could or should do.  Often this was pervasion worked to specific poems’ disadvantage.  Archicembalo was an attempt to let the music theory/music history/performance area of my brain have its own way, find its own form–in language.

The way I put it to the Tupelo marketing mavens was as a question:  “What does it mean to listen to poems the way poems listen to paintings?”

That’s not quite it, really–it introduces a somewhat distracting visual analogue–but if we pretend for a moment that this is a reasonable question, the poems, I think, open up.

So yes, the poems are dense, tough, sometimes funny, etc.  Music is too.

As for “overintellectualized”–I don’t know how to address that.  A great many people seem to think that poets are people who take perfectly transparent ideas and situations and then try to render them opaque through application of language.  If anything, the reverse is true for me.  I start with opacity and work–sometimes work, try to work–towards what strikes me, at least, as an accessible clarity.  The poems in Archicembalo have less of that “accessible” finish, by design.  Of everything I have written or published they come the closest to recapitulating my own state of consciousness, the place from which all my poems–”accessible” or not–proceed.

It is a special book to me, for that reason alone.  Whether it seems more than a curious exercise to anybody else is another question entirely.

In some ways it strikes me as a very intimate, very private book.  Brain music, perhaps.  The new issue of The New Yorker has an article on tinnitus:  what’s going on in the brain when the brain tells the consciousness it hears noises the ears don’t hear at all.  I’m agog.

Do you feel that Amish folks get a sort of disinterested special place in American society? That is to say, are Amish treated with privileges other groups aren’t; as well, are they also completely misunderstood by mainstream, consumer society?

I don’t know how to answer this in the context of Archicembalo.  I mean, I do have thoughts–many thoughts–that address all three of these questions, which are, as you must guess, very large questions indeed.  But the relationship between my faith, my faith community, the larger (“mainstream”) culture, and my poetry is a very complex one.

It is always weird to be called an “X poet” (“Black poet,” “gay poet,” whatever)–to have a single monolithic identifier stitched to one’s name.  (Especially in this instance, since my current church membership is technically with the Old Order River Brethren–a related group–and not with the Amish proper.)  I know that many people think of me casually in this way, but it seems to me that calling me “Amish poet” if nothing else undermines the progress of dialogue itself.

What are your top five (musically related) favorite bands/recording artists?

Hmmm.  Now that is an interesting question, and totally appropriate in the context of Archicembalo–I should have expected it!

“Bands/recording artists” made me smile.  We don’t really get out that much, you know.

As I said, my musical training was largely in early music, and those are still the composers I turn back to when I am thinking about capital-A Art, capital-F form:  Tallis, Byrd, Josquin, Victoria, Isaac, the usual suspects.  There is a kind of architecture in this music–of sound, but also of intellect, a shapeliness–that I admire, that feels generative to me.  And of course somehow faith is part of that equation, that shapeliness, too.  Permission and consequence.

In terms of 20th-century repertoire I tend towards composers who draw or drew to some degree on that earlier, pre-Renaissance tradition:  Benjamin Britten, Arvo Part.

I’ve sung shape note music (from the Sacred Harp and other early American tunebooks) since I was 19.  Its folk harmonies also reflect earlier (pre-Renaissance) understandings of tone and scale and harmony, in a more recognizably American context.  Basically I am a sucker for any perfectly-tuned open fifth or fourth.

This doesn’t speak to specific recordings, though of course early music has been in something of a Renaissance since the 1990s, and there are many, many recordings of shape note music in public and private circulation.

There is a music between things, yes.  Somehow that is foundational.

Just wanted to say thanks for wrestling with the book. It is a bit of a shaggy beast. I’m more than a little astonished that it found a publishing home–though very glad.

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G.C. Waldrep is the author of Archicembalo, One Way No Exit and Goldbeater’s Skin. Archicembalo won the Dorset Prize last year; you can read Ken’s review here, and read Jackie Clark’s review of One Way No Exit here.