"Cocktail Hour with Lee Upton”
At the New School last night, Lee Upton told us that it’s been a lifetime since she was drunk. “I only had maybe a thimbleful of alcohol at the AWP,” she says. Nevertheless, she was sitting in her car one day “when I suddenly remembered what it was like to be drunk at a party.”
From the memory came “Drunk at a Party,” the first of the poems she read to us. The last line: “What keeps a lobster out of a tank?”
The poem “Beer” came next and was (in proper order) followed by “Wine.”
In Russia, a friend of Lee’s learned to alternate bites of sausage with shots of vodka (the sausage absorbs the vodka). “First comes sausage then comes vodka”: so the poem “Shots of Vodka” begins. It ends with a roasted pig on a platter wondering:
“Why do they put an apple in my mouth as if I’m still eating?”
“I like to write about love, writing, failure, and dystopia,” Lee said, and then read “Dyserotica.” This poem, too, ends with a question that is startling, strange, and strangely hurtful:
“I know you don’t love me, but why do you have to brag about it?
The antidote to “Dyserotica” was “The Table” wherein a man has his way with a table.
“Do you get a lot of wrong numbers?” Lee asked us. “And does the caller get angry at you because you’re not the right person?” This happened to her recently, and a few weeks ago she wrote “All the Wrong Numbers,” which begins:
“Are you Linda?”
At the end of the poem, the speaker effectively neutralizes (or absorbs, as sausage does vodka) the acute humiliation of the caller by assuming craziness:
“‘What’s your name?’” she asks him. And then: “He hangs up a bit terrified of you.”
Lee was once sent home from school for employing the vocabulary she’d picked up listening to her father as he cursed at the T.V. “My father was a kind man,” she said, “who didn’t vent his rage at his family, but only at the T.V.” Two shows triggered his rage: Bonanza and professional wrestling.
The Adam character in Bonanza was a bastard for thinking he was too good for the ranch, and professional wrestlers were bastards and sons-of bitches that had it coming to them. “I learned that there was a vast range of ‘bastards’ and a vast range of ‘sons-of-bitches,’” Lee said. In the poem “Vocabulary” she writes about her father:
“He was a saint, but nobody gets to be an amateur.”
In “The Blouse” the speaker becomes suddenly visible, and therefore, ironically, unrecognizable, on the day she wears a new blouse. By way of complimenting her, two men tell her: “I didn’t recognize you!” At one point the speaker asks (another stinging question): “How could I wear the blouse forever?”
Lee Upton doesn’t only write poetry—she writes fiction, essays, and literary criticism. When David Lehman asked her how she divides her writing time, she said that she once met a writer who claimed to write fiction on Mondays, poetry on Tuesdays, Literary Criticism on Wednesdays — “like days-of-the-week panties.” Lee, however, can work on various genres in one day, precisely because one is so different from the others. Literary criticism, she said is “the inversion of poetry.”
“With poetry you’re writing into the unknown, whereas with criticism, you’re explaining something that already exists.”
Lee is in now the process of writing a novel. She said that it was difficult for her to learn the dramatic element of cause-and-effect. “You spend years writing novels that end up going to hell. Some become short stories.”
(Q: Which road is paved with novels, and what is that road’s final destination full of? A: Hell and Short Stories)
“But I give preeminence to poetry because poetry pays off for me in physical sensations of happiness. Does it for you, David?”
“Yes. Poetry is the core,” David said. He added: “I’ve just finished a nonfiction book that I worked on for two years. Whenever I finish a nonfiction book, I always say that I’ll never write another one. But then a perverse impulse pops up a week later.”
He added, “I believe all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do.”
Journalism, David said, taught him to write “clear, declarative sentences that communicate a thought.” He said that all of the work he does now (poetry, editing, nonfiction) has benefited from his experience writing journalism.
Lee, who also once made her living as a journalist, agreed. “And being a journalist also taught me to write anywhere. I can write on the bus—anywhere.”
“As a child I wanted to be a poet, but I thought that they were all dead, and so I couldn’t be one,” Lee said. She also said that she read a lot as a child, and that she’d had poor vision, which went uncorrected. Her only “sphere of control” was the close distance between her eyes and the book she held in her hands. She talked about reading with extreme concentration. “If you read anything—even a instruction manual—very slowly, with extreme concentration, something will happen to you.”
David also suffered from poor eyesight as a child. He was too proud to speak up about it to his parents, but he did pray to God: please spare me from wearing glasses. “Wearing glasses was a worse hell than writing short stories,” he said.
(Q: Which of the following two things managed to get out of hell by becoming a fashion accessory: eyeglasses or short story writers? A: Yikes it’s hot in here.)
Lee is now working on “Swallowing the Sea,” a book of meditations about failure, purity, boredom, ambition, and other things. She said that extreme compression is a purifying impulse, and that purity is a psychological force. “You can defeat it but it rises up again.” Lee said that she prefers the extreme compression of Marianne Moore’s final version of “Poetry.”
“I come from a people who are so clean. If you do not clean out an empty can of tuna, you are wrong,” Lee said. And: “You ignore the subject of purity at your own peril. Always behind you is the vulture who wants to make the work perfect.”
(A vulture, I think, familiar to Raymond Carver.)
On the subject of ambition, David said:
“One year at summer camp I was named ‘Most Ambitious,’ David said. “There was a lazy character on TV at that time nicknamed ‘Ambitious’ and since I was too young to know what irony was, I took my camp name as a bad thing.”
Irony aside, ambition often is thought of as a bad thing — perhaps even an impure thing. Lee said when she was growing up, she was taught that one should not go beyond one’s station in life. “Which was why my father hated Adam of Bonanza so much.”
Among such prize-wining poems that Lee had read earlier in the evening (which included “Dickinson’s Day Lilies”), she read a poem called “Odysseus in the Orchard,” a poem that she’s been rewriting and rewriting for years, a poem that she can’t, she says, give away. “I keep sending it out and it keeps flying back to me.” And then she said—and this struck me as purely, ambitiously, and intensely like Emily Dickinson:
“I’m so devoted to this poem and I’m so alone in that devotion.”
-- Angela Patrinos
