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How about the importance of your relationship to German?
When the 1848 Revolution happened in Germany, a huge wave of immigrants came to my hometown of Akron, Ohio. I grew up among people with German-sounding names. The school I went to, Schumacher Elementary, was named after a German immigrant who was instrumental in introducing oatmeal to America. There was a kind of wash of German all around me, so when I had to choose a language in seventh grade, the choice wasn’t difficult.
When you study another language, you understand your own a little better. You’ll think: Oh, that’s how they build a sentence! And suddenly grasp how English does it. I love the fact that every language has its own sound cage. And, interestingly enough, all of my German teachers in public high school were native German speakers. One was a Swiss woman, one was a German woman. I came out of high school with a pretty good accent and a pretty good reading comprehension of German. I didn’t think I was going to do anything with it beyond reading German in the original.
The turning point came when one of my undergraduate German professors asked me if I was going to apply for a Fulbright. I thought: But that’s for people who really want to study the language, and I just want to read. He asked: “Do you want to see the world?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, then, make up something!” I made up a project tailored to my love of reading—I proposed translating German poetry. But I didn’t really want to translate! I just wanted to get to Germany.
In Germany, I began to experience what it was like to think in another language. Also, the way Germans looked at me—with curiosity but no racial baggage—was so different than Americans. I began to understand a little bit more about my own country and how I fit in or not.
German syntax showed me ways in which English could be stretched to accommodate consciousness. If there’s a past participle in German, for instance, the entire verb always comes at the end of the sentence. I thought it was so amazing that Germans were able to hold onto incredibly complex clauses until the verb brought it all together. And I thought: If you could do that in poetry, you’d get the epiphany—ping!—right at the end. That changed the way I was working in my own poems.
And then I met my husband. I was in my second year of graduate school at Iowa. He was a German writer invited as part of the international writing program, and because I spoke German I was supposed to translate his talk. So I translated his lecture, and we kept on going! Germany, and the German language, became a part of my life. As I learned to straddle languages and cultures, my world changed.
In graduate school, you would check out books from various disciplines—math or computer science or whatever. Are there any language systems that you’ve been working with recently that have been useful for you?
Our daughter’s field is visual-and-cultural studies. A crucial part of her work focuses on how the site of visual presentation influences our quality of looking—from walking through an installation to looking at a painting in a museum to watching TV or diving into Facebook—ever smaller areas which, oddly enough, open up wider and wider linguistic interactions.
For example, think of all the people who’d never dream of writing a letter but can tweet their little butts away or send messages on their smartphones all the time. I am fascinated with that kind of chattery language. I’m intrigued by it vocabulary-wise, but also syntactically. My tendency is to be as economical as possible in my poems, so I like to push myself toward looser syntax. It goes against my grain, but that is exactly why I do it. It’s partly why, when writing Sonata Mulattica, I was interested in language that likes to hear itself talk. And, if you look at my early books, that’s not exactly where I was coming from.
I’m also interested in the language of voice-overs. A lot of voice-overs play out as thoughts in someone’s head; but it’s a very public head, a very public thought. It’s as if you were telling your biography to your mirror, or going into confession knowing the booth’s been wired for sound. It’s not interior, really, and it’s not exactly a pronouncement. It’s somewhere in between. I don’t know what my poems will do with that. I have no idea. But I am interested.
Poetic engagements with Twitter are fascinating. Elizabeth Alexander had Twitter poems for a while, and Fady Joudah has a book of “textu,” poems of 160 characters. It’s at once, as you say, this chatty language, but with profound spatial constraints.
I have not entered the world of Twitter. For some reason, I refuse to go there, I don’t know why. Partly because Twitter has the rigor of poetry in terms of spatial constraints—but it’s not actually a lyric rigor because Twitter does not presume it is to stop time. A haiku wants to cast a spell, to lift you out of the stream of time and say, “Look at this.” But a Twitter poem does something else; I’m not sure what yet.
I like the notion that there’s a subset of human intercourse occurring—I guess this is more Facebook, Instagramland—where you follow the progress of someone’s life. You’re more intimately involved with a distant friend’s life than you ever could have been via standard letters or phone calls. And yet, you’re also quite distant, estranged, even—because it isn’t really a conversation. Pick up a phone or sit across from someone, and that discussion is an immediate back and forth. That’s a direct connection between your emotional state and theirs.
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