THE ANTHOLOGIST SINCE 1927 THE LITERARY AND FINE ARTS JOURNAL OF RUTGERS COLLEGE I N T E R V I E W S Reprinted from The Anthologist Fall 1999 Joel Lewis is currently working as a social working in New York City. His most recent publication is Vertical's Currency. He has also written Entropia and House Rent Boogie. He edited Bluestones and Salt Hay: An Anthology of New Jersey Poets. He has taught at Rutgers University and the New School University in New York City. He has lived most of his life in North Jersey and currently lives in Hoboken with his wife. Me and Joel I sat down with Joel Lewis one day late in December. We met in the Borders Bookstore under the World Trade Center. I came prepared with a tape recorder and a few questions. When we sat down, though, he just started talking. I basically just listened. I didn't bother with the tape recorder. I just let it all sink in and scribbled frantically in a littler green book I carry with me mostof the time. It ended up not being a question and answer session but more like he was taeching me in my own personal Creative Writing class. I always learn a lot when I sit down and talk with Joel. He always has a very intersting take on the world and poetry in general. So that's what I decided when I say down to write this interview to give to you. It's just Joel Talking, in his voice, without mine getting in the way. A Note about New Jersey I feel the need to explain that Joel writes about New Jersey a lot in his poetry. It may not always necessarily be about New Jersey, but some aspect of New Jersey is usually mentioned. It may be the name of a town or a reference to something that can only be found in our lovely state. Whatever it may be, Joel has become slightly famous for his Jersey tidbits. It is this regional writing that started our conversation… Why New Jersey? I don't consider myself a regional writer. A lot has to do with my own circumstance of growing up and continuing to live in Hudson County. It's rare that a writer ends up living about five miles from where they grew up. I was educated in New Jersey I have a BA and MA from William Paterson University, in addition to a creative writing Masters from CCNY and a social work MSW from Yeshiva University and I am very familiar with the towns around where I've lived my entire life. I've always been intrigued by the towns of North Jersey. Each has a history which becomes an understanding of the evolution of a place. New Jersey has always been such a crossroads. We are the prime highway and train route from NYC and New England to everything else. If there is a state "attitude", it has a lot to do with being a place where many are passing through or preparing to leave to somewhere perceived as more glamorous. Non-residents question my writing about New Jersey. They know about William Carlos Williams and Paterson, but they find it hard to find a guy still doing that. As for me, it is just home. And, as someone very influenced by the poetries of Charles Olson, I think there is a kind of truth and useful story told in the geography of one's locale. I love the names of the cities and streets. One of the most beautiful sights, I think, is seeing the cat crackers above the Turnpike. There are so many things in New Jersey that are beautiful. The contrasting geopgrahies make it so intriguin. In our tiny state, we contain a slice of the Appalachians, The Pine Barrens, The Palisades, and the Hackensack Meadows-which I stared out at to kill class time from my high schools' windows. As someone whose father is an Auschwitz survivor and whose maternal grandfather was a socialist labor leader, my leanings are towards the working class and oppressed strata of this culture. "My" New Jersey is not the Somerset Hills or Rumson-it is really invested in places like Paterson or the last bits of the immigrant culture of Hoboken. I think Rutgers kids reflect part of this Jersey working class culture. They don't walk around with that "Gee I'm special" attitude that you might see down the road at Princeton where people are trained all their lives to believe they are special. I think my poetry tries to capture those things that I notice in the places around me. Writing should be about looking at the world and being observant. I write about New Jersey because it is what I know - Although it is not the only thing I know about. I think my training and practice as a social work has added to my writing. Working with very poor kids, mostly from families shattered by drugs and AIDS, helps put things in a different hierarchy of importance. Day to day, I have to deal with the fallout from a racist culture that seems to invest an inordinate amount of time and money in policing and regulating poor people. It is a far different world from Academia where human actions tend to be reified and abstracted. Communities of Poets Communities of poets are all over the place, it's just a matter of finding them. The trick is finding a poetry community that is serious about writing, not about being "cool" or "hip". When I sartarted writing, I though I was the last poet because I was running into so few writers my age. It seemed to be a quaint idea to people that I wanted to be a poet when I was starting out in the late 70's. There wasn't a tremendous encouragement for a career in the arts. I started to find communities of writers. I began to attend readings and workshop at the Poetry Project at St. Marks around 1979 and I became good friends with the poets Ted Berrigan and his wife Alice Notley. They were real live working poets who cared deeply about young poets. They provided me with an invaluable support system. I think if I didn't tale that leap across the river to engage poets in the downtown scene then I wouldn't have really continued as a writer on anything more than a casual basis. Writing While Living It is really possible to be a successful poet; the key is disciplining yourself. And you don't have to live in poverty. The job market is much more fluid now, so you don't necessarily have to do a 9 to 5 job either. The trick is making time to write. I taught a workshop for adults once. People who took the course had a job separate from their writing. There were doctors and executives. My job, right now is in social work. I find myself writing at two a.m. some nights. I know a number of student writers are preparing for a most top level suburban high school teachers do better salary-wise than most Rutgers professors! Best advice I've ever seen about trying to work and trying to write comes from the great newspaper writers Pete Hamill: When you come home from work take a nap, then get up and write. You also always have to try and keep yourself engaged with both the world and with the literature. Keep reading new things. I think you should mistrust anyone who says they like to write poetry but don't like to read it. They're a little to ego-centered to ever do anything that interesting. Writing is much "easier" when you're young. You have this big lake of family stories, life experiences and strange things that the weird people in your life have been telling you - and now it's all "material". But, at a certain point you tap out the "significant stories about your life - the big boyfriend breakup a bout with a serious illness, your suicide attempt. If you are very lucky, most of your life may become just "average" and free from serious angst & life sorrows, and "going on" as a writer will become difficult if you haven't seriously engaged with the huge tradition of poetry. Writing then becomes more about thinking about the issues in structure and form-which is not unlike how most creative folks proceed. A lot of my own writing is based in college-like effects and the results of the resonance of placing things seemingly disparate up against each other. I've been influenced a great deal by John Ashbery's middle period work though I think few people notice that because the Jersey thematic and my own preference for a rough inelegant, neo-Abstract Impressionist surface. Poetry as Art Like most committed writers, I pick up different things from different people. Poetry is less about what is being said then how you say it. How did you get from A to E? Emotion is only one component of poetry. I've always been amazed to continually find in my workshop that the sunniest and happiest people in class write such amazingly depressing stuff one step away from a suicide note! I think so many young poets get exposed to folks like Plath & Sexton, but get little exposure to expansive writers like Kenneth Koch, who cover a lot wider swath of poetic turf. Really, there are only about seven or eight different themes in poetry. It's all in how you say it. 'Howl' (by Alan Ginsberg) was aying something about the world in 1955 as perceived by an unknown, Jewish homosexual poet with left-wing leanings, but it was also structurally interesting. The reason we still read it and that my students in Beat Literature class at the New School University still find it compelling is the radically of the form, amazing energy of the text and Ginsberg's unique and vivid language. I've read the poem dozens of times since I was a sophomore sitting in the WillyPee Cafeteria, but it is till a gas to teach and reread. Writing Today Now is as good a time as any to be a poet. The rise of poetry has come about with the rise of the Internet. Also, the economy of publishing is better. It's really only the cost of paper to make your own chapbook. Desktop publishing and web magazines have made publishing easy and accessible to many people. The Mega-bookstores, with their decent poetry selections and monthly readings, have made people aware of the existence of contemporary poetry. You can also get a solid and cheap education at these mega-stores. Just go in, do some research, drink some coffee. It's also there that you will find your local community of writers, oddballs, and street intellectuals - membership among these groups being quite fluid. So what is so terrific about poetry? It is cheap and portable. No tubes of paint, no darkroom equipment, no blocks of marble to chip away at. Books? You can haunt used bookstores, use the library or borrow books from friends & never give them back. Paper? When William Carlos Williams got married, his in-laws, who had a stationary business, gave him a ton of foolscap paper. He was till using it 50 years later! So you don't need to get hitched to get ink jet 24ib bond - you can buy a good quality roam from Staples for three bucks! and if no one wants to publish your sheaf of brilliant squibs of energy-do it yourself! If it was good enough for Whitman - it should be good enough for you. And So... Why are so many folks glued to "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" and wrestling smackdowns? Contemporary mass culture, if you let it run your life, essentially teaches you to be an uncritical consumer of whatever puke they throw at you. Poetry, like music and photography, gives you something to think through and see the world. It is a way of engagement that non one can take away from you. It gives you a way of mediating the world. By writing a poem you actually create that rarest of creatures in the world capitalist culture-something with virtually no monetary or utilitarian value. All you need to do is to write an honest poem. By "honest" I mean a poem that isn't sent out into the world because you either hope it will get into Magazine "X" or that people will read it and think you are the greatest thing since mayonnaise. Just write a poem that you really like. A poem about being "you" in a particular place and time that speaks to the experience of experiencing that particular space. What makes something last - that is, read past your own generation - is that you can get an essence that transcends generations. You don'' have to lift the ego barbells or ask all those "high in the dorm commons at 2 am" questions like: Where do I fit in as an artist? Why do I write?..And do people really care?...You just sit down and write.