The Band

From the beginning, I wrote them both,
the words and the music, the rhymes and the chords.
I spread the word and placed the advertisements
and judged the auditions then hired the band.

I wish I could say the rest is history.
I thought I could tell you something extraordinary.
We practiced every day, had some laughs and fights,
got some girls, opened once for Bon Jovi.

I will never love nature as much as I should.
Or pets or a coo of a baby or sunset.
I guess you could say we failed, the band.
I accept the blame, as I accepted the responsibility

and I offer you this one song, clearly our best,
dated as it is, which they will sing to me, my children—
is that all there is in the end, our work?—
in the bed in the room with the monitors.

And despite that and not even one glimpse of fame
I am glad we tried to make it then and make it big.

 

“The Band” and two additional new poems are featured in the latest issue of The Ocean State Review 

Steve Langan has carved out one of the most singular, idiosyncratic bodies of work in contemporary poetry. His poems are intricate negotiations of space and image, inhabited by disparate individuals both searching for something while simultaneously on the run. The speakers, at times, appear equally static and constantly moving, looking for things just barely out of reach, balancing time and the strange ways of the world, as the speaker in “Evangelical,” from Langan’s first collection, Freezing (2001), questions and notes:

Have you ever despised yourself over the cause
of a riddle? Or started in the middle?
Let me assure you we dream disunion and regret.
And I intend to tell you a host of anecdotes—
but I must return to staring from this misbegotten porch
at the steel sections and long and short tubing

the factory next door has assembled, thinking of the future.
If you wish, we will begin again later.

Steve Langan’s MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. He is the author of Freezing, Notes on Exile and Other Poems, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, and What It Looks Like, How It Flies. Langan’s poems appear in a variety of journals, including the Kenyon, Gettysburg, Chicago, Iowa, Colorado, North American, Notre Dame and Southern Humanities Reviews…and Prairie Schooner, Fence, Verse, Jacket, Slope, Pool and Diagram. He teaches at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, at the English Department and the UNO MFA in Writing program, where he serves as Program Development Coordinator. He is also Interim Director and Community Liaison, Medical Humanities, at UNO. Additionally, Langan is founder and director of the Seven Doctors Project, a creative writing program established at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 2008 to help serve physicians, healthcare workers, and members of the community.

I asked Steve a few questions about poetry and practice.

Charles Kell: “Driving into the Unbeautiful City,” the opening poem from Freezing, is such a startling beginning to a first book. It announces an original, unique voice; it’s powerful, risky in that it’s a longer poem to open with; it’s also a “beginning” and a “middle,” the speaker is already on the journey toward this strange place that seems both eerily familiar and completely disorienting. A notion running through your work is “trouble,” trouble in all of its manifestations—can you talk about trouble a bit?

Steve Langan: Oh, that’s my favorite subject! And a calling! Though you need to know from the beginning that I’m retired from the trouble business. It’s easier over the long haul to write trouble than live it. I wanted early on to be a grown up. Many of my first jottings in a hidden notebook sprang out of an electrifying connection to some kind of trouble. It’s not uncommon for a curious adolescent to go directly where he’s told not to go, yes?

So I would not forget those odd and maybe even, at times, scary or dangerous occasions, I wrote them down. I started to shape and sculpt them into sets of descriptions and statements, into little poems, though I wouldn’t have called them poems. I was compelled to retain those early claims on mystery and discovery…for myself, most of all. That’s where poetry often begins, I think, with not wanting to forget or have to give up some vital experience, a real one or an imaginative one or both.

Most people only write two poems, when they fall in love and when they break up. For me, disruptions and dislocations of all kinds, especially self-imposed ones, are interesting. In addition to being startling—a poem depends on some element of surprise—they can be funny sometimes.

CK: I mention “risk” above; what role does risk play in your work, both in the poems and in the form, construction?

SL: I was so lucky to work with supremely talented American poets in the early 90s who valued and promoted risk in general and emotional risk, the belief that the poet creates new emotional knowledge, in particular. I arrived in Iowa City with a notion that the life I had led, full of the usual youthful troubles that had me bogged down and now a young family, including a son who was born during my first year at the Writers’ Workshop, could be made into poems. What a lucky draw. If you know the work of the late and great poets Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, and Philip Levine, may they rest in peace, as well as Marvin Bell, James Galvin, Jorie Graham and Gerald Stern, you will understand that risk was encouraged at every turn, in the form and in the content. These were lessons and practices that I took to heart and try, in my own teaching, to pass on to others.

For instance, when someone says something in a poem that he thinks he shouldn’t say, warning bells going off but the utterance is made regardless—what I believe Samuel Beckett meant when he used the word “ununsaid”—a poetic risk is being taken that should probably be acknowledged, validated, and acted and built upon. And no, I’m not talking about shock value, though that’s one way to enact risk. There are a variety of ways to get there, many of them subtle. Your question makes me want to ask someone to name their favorite artist…then the form of risk this artist works from.

CK: Section II of Freezing is a series of seven poems where the speaker fixates and contemplates a pair of black pants viewed from a window. Each poem follows a specific form/shape as well. I’m extremely interested in the “things” that continually pop up in your poems, the flotsam, the detritus thought about and experienced. Can you talk about “things” in your work, and, perhaps, how the focus on “things” helps you think about structuring the poem?

SL: In classroom settings, particularly with adults, healthcare workers, and professionals who join us for the Seven Doctors Project writing sessions here in Omaha, I start with a basic idea, one that I came to after listening over and over to Toni Morrison’s beautiful Nobel Speech, the idea that “other than seeing something or having a dream, language is the only way I can see.” If you’ve been in my classroom, even for 20 minutes, you have heard me say it and put this idea into practice.

As one of my poems is coming in to being, asserting itself and becoming closer to an entire experience, I start to think a lot about how the reader is receiving it and particularly how she is seeing it. You don’t want to give her too much to see—that’s a mistake a lot of us make, too many layers, the brain can’t take it all in—but you don’t want to give her too little to see, either. The privilege of making poems for readers to experience is in directing their imagination from one marker or foothold or item to the next, all the while knowing they will stray, which creates another, even fuller, experience. Either way, the poet is a delivery system. That’s our job description.

CK: I’m drawn, as well, to your use of place, setting in your work. In Freezing there are many distinct places: vehicles, bars, various apartments, houses that play a large role. In your second collection, Meet Me at the Happy Bar (2009), place is still at the forefront, but it seems to have changed, shifted, become more disembodied, I’m specifically thinking of the wonderful poem, “Notes on Exile.” How does place play a role and how has it shifted?

SL: Thank you for your kind words about “Notes on Exile.” I read that poem out loud recently—for the first time in a long time. Yes, it moves from place to place, idea to idea, gesture to gesture. The form, one and two line stanzas jabbing back and forth, makes for instant and sustained speediness. So the challenge is to do speed and control both. Just enough but not too much, as I mentioned. I’m usually reluctant to talk directly about my poems. So much energy can be taken away from makers, I fear, when we talk, or try to talk, about creative process. But you asked about place and mentioned that poem, and it would be a little rude to shrug it off.

Before I read “Notes on Exile” out loud, I provided a clue, really the only one I have to offer. I said, “If there’s anything that unifies this poem, it’s food. And diners.” I think I mention food and I place the action of this poem, one of the many swirling sites of the action, in the context of a diner three or four times in “Notes on Exile.” The rest of the mentions—associative riffs borne out of sound, frivolous or cheeky or goofy mentions, little moves to entertain or even throw the reader off the trail—are, to the best of my recollection, random. An additional aim of this poem, one that I discovered in the last four lines and liked and kept, was to break the reader’s heart. I almost always want to break the reader’s heart, even if it doesn’t appear that way on the surface, and it’s difficult to get to that place, pathos, without starting from some specific place.

CK: The poems in Meet Me in the Happy Bar are quite different from your first collection; they seem more fractured, it’s a completely different text that does different things. Some themes I gathered from Freezing, guilt and desire, seem more “lived-in” but also just as difficult to come to terms with. Can you speak a little about the notions of guilt and desire in this collection?

SL: Probably a good place to say “no comment” and walk?

Forced to continue, I think it’s a good idea to establish the poet’s aims, starting with how the poet’s aims can be different from the novelist’s or the story writer’s aims. My novelist friend is restless in her analysis of the day to day activities of people. She wants to learn as much as he can about what we do. It’s research. Through determinations made about our routines and habits she discovers what grounds her fictional characters. And away she goes, writing these characters into situations that include the messy stuff like guilt and desire. It’s magic.

The poet cares much more about how we think. He wants his thinking to enter into the bloodstream of your thinking. (“You built a temple deep inside their hearing,” as Rainer Maria Rilke writes, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation.) In a poem, compared to a novel, the stakes are lower; the intimacy level is higher, maybe because of that, or because it’s condensed and direct, frequently. Also, a poet could begin writing every poem with the presumption that whoever picks up the poem has a need, a spiritual need, a need that includes guilt or desire or one of a thousand other needs. Some people don’t need poetry. They’re just fine the way they are.

I addressed the needful reader directly, in the fourth-to-last line of a poem I wrote titled “The Cycle.” I wrote, “You have come this far; you must understand emptiness.” This is just one example, one of an infinite number of examples and maybe the best example from my own work, of meeting the reader with a sense, a hunch, of where they are. Of what plagues them. Again: guilt, desire.

At one time, I thought my poems would evolve on a linguistic continuum, getting more and more fractured as they went along, until, at the end, I would be writing sound without sense. And then I would expire.

But that’s not what’s occurring. I realize, with gratitude to you for your deep and perceptive questions, that my poems are moving on a spiritual continuum. Now, they’re as much about finding my way toward peace and fulfillment as they were, not too many years ago, about finding my way to trouble. I have about 70 new poems I am slowly shaping into a manuscript. The working title is “Bedtime Stories.” You’re a great reader of my poetry. Thank for your time and your focus on my work. May I send you my poems?

CK: Yes, please send them along. I can’t wait.

“Notes on Exile” in Jacket

Steve Langan reading at the Salt Lake Art Center