The Deep, Dark, Seething Tar Pit of the Past

AMY GERSTLER: David, you have two new books out. Tell us a little about them.

DAVID TRINIDAD: So, New Playlist is a regular ol’ book of poems, but it’s got a lot of movie poems in it, as well as other sorts of playful formal things. And then I also have a chapbook coming out called Hollywood Cemetery, where I speak as 35 dead actors, like Spoon River Anthology.

AG: Real actors with their real names.

DT: Yes, exactly.

AG: And so we get all the alcoholism and the suicides and the affairs and the juicy, amazing perspective of the dead. I've always loved a dead narrator. I love that in Sunset Boulevard.

DT: Often, after I watch a movie, I'll look up the actors and some of them have these incredibly tragic lives and deaths. I'm always sort of moved by that. And you have a new book coming out from Penguin?

AG: I do. I always wanted to have a book that has a question for a title. And I also like the idea of titles having punctuation in them, simply because they usually don't. So, this one has a title that has a question mark at the end, because it is a question, which is: Is This My Final Form?

DT: For me, of course, it conjures ideas of mortality.

AG: And transformation and reincarnation and self-reinvention and change, change, change. Change being the only constant—stuff like that. And then, also, people talk a lot about form and poetry, so . . .

DT: Are there forms in it?

AG: There's a play in it, and there's prose poems, and there's verse poems, and there's ones that do different things with stanza.

DT: And some sonnets.

AG: Quite a few. I know you're a big fan, as am I, of Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. And I was reading a fair amount of them, and reading this talk that Berrigan did at the Poetry Project a long time ago about sonnets and his sonnets. I found it so bracing and inspiring, and it made me think about lines differently. I wanted to pay more attention to the individual line. My poems tend to be thin columns and kind of run-on very often. So, I tried to write this suite of sonnets. I love sonnets, but none of mine are really strict classical sonnets. They're mostly just 14-line poems.

DT: Right.

AG: So, we're old friends. Since our childhoods, practically, since our writing childhoods . . .

DT: Should we talk about how we met?

AG: For one minute. I know you're really interested in the past because you're like an archivist and a researcher, which I really admire. I don't know why, but I always feel like I'm fleeing the past or trying to escape it and erase it and make it go away.

DT: Maybe we balance each other out.

AG: So, what do you wanna talk about: the deep, dark, seething tar pit of the past?

DT: We met through Beyond Baroque in Venice, you know, the arts foundation in Venice [California]. I remember the first time I saw you, which was in 1979, when you and Dennis Cooper and Jack Skelley came to a reading I was doing, which was actually a memorial reading for my friend Rachel Sherwood.

AG: And you were on crutches.

DT: I was on crutches.

AG: Because you had been in that horrible car accident with her in which she was . . .

DT: Died.

AG: . . . killed.

DT: Exactly.

AG: And in which you were gravely injured.

DT: So, I was recovering from that. And Dennis came up to me afterwards, and I knew who he was because I knew about Little Caesar magazine that he edited, and he basically said, we want you to be in our gang. Of course, I was thrilled and honored to be asked to be part of that scene.

AG: He's an amazing writer and figure and scene organizer. And him doing that is so Dennis. He was like the recruitment officer.

DT: But it was also sort of like, come play with us, you know.

AG: It was like join my merry band of outlaws.

DT: Then he became director of the reading series at Beyond Baroque. I think it might have been at a Tim Dlugos reading, like in ’80 or ’81. Dennis brought Tim from New York to read. And I was so shy. Well, I still am shy, but I was especially shy when I was younger, and I kind of moseyed away from the crowd and went into the Beyond Baroque bookstore and I thought, let me go behind this bookcase and kind of hide. And I went around the corner and you were there.

AG: Already hiding! That's one of the great meet cutes in my life: hiding behind the bookcase at a literary social gathering to try and gather myself because I have such social anxiety disorder and do so poorly with crowds, even if I wanna be there. And even if they're mostly like-minded people. And lo and behold, there was another burrowing animal who also wanted to hide.

DT: I wish I could remember our conversation.

AG: This is a really long time ago, but we talked, and I knew who you were.

DT: Ditto. I remember your reading at Beyond Baroque for your first chapbook, Yonder. So that would've been 1981.

AG: You’re someone who likes the past, who knows all these dates. I'm just like whatever, or blur, blur, blur.

DT: I like to nail things down.

AG: I'm really bad with time in the past. In my own past, I'm just like, let the dark curtain fall.

DT: At the Yonder reading you read “Before Completion,” which is a poem about a couple. I think they're at a party. And the woman goes outside; the man is on the balcony, and the woman goes outside to talk to him and ask if he's sulking. And he says, no, I was admiring you from here. And I remember how blown away I was by that beautiful ending.  I’ve been a fan of your work ever since. That's what sealed the deal.

AG: I never knew that. That's very sweet. That title is one of the hexagrams in the I Ching.

I wanted to ask you for purely selfish reasons, because I got assigned to do a little text on how people decide when a poem is finished . . . So, I'm gonna cheat and ask a few writers I know if they have thoughts about this. How and under what logic or protocol or judging criteria do your poems begin and end?

DT: Most, if not all, of my poems begin with an idea—not only of subject matter, but also of form. I can sort of see it in my mind's eye.

AG: So, you kind of have a container and a bit of the contents?

DT: I need to know what I'm writing about. I'm very deliberate. And then once the poem gets going, it has an energy of its own. It could be one sitting or it could be months even, the life of the poem. I think I know when it's finished when it just stops bothering me.

AG: That’s a great line.

DT: Because there'll be things like . . . that's not the right word, or that part could be better, or I should cut that. It gnaws at me until everything is in place.

AG: Do you show drafts to people to get feedback?

DT: I do. I've always had one or two close readers of my poems. Well, you're still one. You were one in the beginning. What about you? What are your ideas about this?

AG: There's this prose writer Evan Connell, who wrote Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, among many other things, who I admire enormously. And in an interview, he once said that he knew when something was done because he found himself putting in and taking out again the same pieces of punctuation. Like, it got down to that.

And I talked to Bernard Cooper this morning, a mutual friend who's both a writer and a visual artist, and he said he thought he remembered some quote from Alexander Calder or David Smith, the artists. One of them said: I know when a sculpture is finished because it's time for dinner.

DT: I wish it were that easy for poets.

AG: Since you brought up your very close relationship to movies—I consider you kind of a film scholar—and I know you taught film along with many poetry and literature type classes at Columbia College Chicago, and you have this Hollywood Cemetery book, which is just marinated in film knowledge and research and history, so, I’m interested in the interplay between your work and your fascination with and love of movies. Every time I come over, you have more rare DVDs. I won't even begin to speculate where you get them, but it's not porn.

DT: Right.

AG: Well, I guess actually a lot of it is pre-code stuff that was considered racy at the time.

DT: That's right. Movies have always been important to me. I don't think I would've gotten through my adolescence without movies. I saw as many movies as I could at local theaters, but mostly on TV. I have a poem called “The Late Show” that evokes some of those images from that time. But like Ted Berrigan says in one of his sonnets, everything turns into writing. So, I feel like whatever I'm interested in or obsessed with ends up in the poems eventually. But movies have been a big obsession in my life, so of course they're there.

AG: Do you have other obsessions?

DT: Barbie.

AG: I think the past and childhood . . .

DT: Memory. I've always loved Joe Brainard's I Remember, and work that looks back or deals with the past. Even when I was young, I was interested in the past. It's strange.

AG: You seem like someone who was always a memoirist in a way, and very much an observer. And you’re interested in visual art and photographs and stuff like that.

Speaking of which, I love this idea that there are people who just come out of their mothers and seem like they've always been who they are. And I remember at a reading a long time ago, you read part of your kindergarten report card.

DT: God, I don't remember that.

AG: If I may say so, it was like the perfect report card for a certain kind of . . . not to stereotype you, but it was like David is very verbal and loves books, but he only wants to play with the girls and he only likes the dolls and he hates getting dirty. And it was just like, oh my God, the perfect little gay artist!

DT: That sounds right.

AG: And it was just very charming and prophetic.

DT: Do you have any ongoing obsessions?

AG: I think I have layers of obsessions, and sometimes it takes me writing to even unearth them, to bring them into enough of a level of consciousness that I can deal with them. I think I always have been obsessed with women and being female and what that is, and gender and women's lives and interactions between the genders and gender slippage even, maybe because I always felt like I was a mix of what people call female, what people call male, and then maybe a few animals thrown in.

DT: You've always had persona poems—women's voices, men's voices, animal voices.

AG: I love dramatic monologues. Maybe that's partly related to the fact that my mom wanted to be an opera singer and a singer in musicals, and she studied music. And she took me and my siblings when they wanted to go to plays and musicals. But I was the only one that went to opera with her because my father and my brother and my sister didn't love opera. Even now, if you bring up opera to my sister, she says all that screaming. I think everybody has snippets of song and things from the past and things people have said to them, and bits of dreams and new and old conversations and stuff they've read swirling around in their head more or less at all times.

So, I know this is a commonly asked question, but like many commonly asked questions, it's something I really wanna know. Who are some of your favorite poets now and some of your favorite poets when you began wanting to be a poet?

DT: Right now—and I didn't plan it, it just sort of happened—I'm rereading all of William Carlos Williams’s poems.

AG: Yeah, I see here on the table his Selected Essays, volume one of his Collected Poems, and a series of letters between him and Denise Levertov. You seem to me to be kind of a completist.

DT: I am, totally. Like I wanna see every pre-code movie that I can see, right?

AG: Is that possible?

DT: Yes, except for the ones that are lost.

AG: Of course.

DT: It causes me much grief that things are lost. Well, we can say the same thing about Sappho and literature.

AG: That seems to really connect to your deep drive to be a memoirist and an archivist and a kind of rescuer of the work of poets whose work might otherwise have gone missing.

DT: Yeah.

AG: But anyway, I'm asking all the questions at once. I'm getting crazy here. Sorry.

DT: So Williams, you know, I feel like he's sort of the muse of the moment. And I recently read the selected poems of Borges, and I really loved him. At this point, I feel like if you really wanna know a poet, you have to read everything.

The first poet who had a major impact on me was Anne Sexton, who I found on my own when I was starting to study poetry in college. She wasn't on the curriculum at that time. I think she was so important to me because she showed me a way of writing autobiographically. I wanted to write about myself. It wasn't so much the confessional aspect as it was her voice, the directness of her voice, her brilliance with simile and metaphor. And then the influences kept racking up. Sylvia Plath was very important for similar reasons.

AG: Right.

DT: Once Dennis introduced me to the New York School poets, James Schuyler became as important to me as Sexton, and for similar reasons. The way you really feel on intimate terms with him. I wanted that quality in my own poems.

AG: Yeah, I always tell you that I think you're his son, his heir. I think he was so profound and beautiful. And you actually got to know him a little.

DT: I was very lucky to be able to know him as a friend.

AG: And Brainard too, right?

DT: Brainard, yeah, and Tim Dlugos. But how about you?

AG: Well, I want to ask you one more thing before we switch to me racking my brain about poets I love. You have taken an interest for a while in the Greeks.

DT: Yes.

AG: And you keep finding these weird and obscure and absolutely wonderful pieces of ancient Greek literature, where some ancient guy just, like, talks about the weather or the moon.

DT: Or constellations.

AG: And one where it’s a guy talking about statues in a courtyard.

DT: Oh yeah. Christodorus has a great description of all the statues at a famous gymnasium. He wrote a poem about each statue. And, of course, the statues in the gymnasium are long gone, but the poems remain. I just love that.

AG: And that combines your interests in loss and preservation.

DT: I think it's connected to that, the deep past and what little has survived and the ghosts of what is lost. And I don't know how I found Ausonius, to be honest, but I think I went to him because he had a work that was written in one day. And I thought, did Bernadette Mayer know of this—because of Midwinter Day.

AG: She's another touchstone for you, yes?

DT: Yes, but later. I didn't come to her work till much later. And I love her deeply. How about you in terms of now and then?

AG: I first tried to write poetry, seriously and intentionally—which sounds pretentious, but I don't know another way to say it—in college. I wasn't studying it. I was a psych major. But I was starting to read poetry under Dennis Cooper's tutelage. We went to the same college, and he was well-read and strutting around wearing Rimbaud t-shirts. He was a really amazing influence, and he completely changed my life. I had read Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson a little bit, and Edgar Allan Poe. I felt like every time I read that stuff, I went into a hypnotic state. It was wonderful, but I didn't think anyone did poetry like that anymore. And Dennis was like, what the fuck, you know, get real. And he showed me Russell Edson and James Tate, and I was just like, oh, there's people doing this now.

I took a couple of poetry classes from this wonderful poet in college, Bert Meyers, but the anthologies that he picked, which were really good anthologies of the time, had either one woman or no women in them. And I was like, hmm, so I asked him to make me a list of women poets that he liked, which he did. And I still have this old, yellowed piece of paper with his beautiful spidery handwriting. Then I started to read, you know, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore and Lucille Clifton and all kinds of people. I'm just a slut, really. A poetry slut. I like so much stuff. I love Shakespeare. I love Tracy K. Smith. I especially love Life on Mars, which I think is her second book. Currently, I love our mutual friend Elaine Equi's work. I love Diane Seuss's work. I really am a big fan of Ada Limón. I love Sylvia Plath. I love Anne Sexton, too. And I love a lot of non-poetry stuff. Like, I love Sei Shōnagon.

DT: Oh, yeah, The Pillow Book is fabulous. I remember you turned me on to that in the early ‘80s.

AG: Yeah, I went through a period of reading The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book and The Story of the Stone, whose title is also listed as The Dream of the Red Chamber. It's this series of five or six volumes of this amazing multigenerational family epic, Chinese, pretty ancient.

Oh, I really love this poet who I can only read in translation, because I don't speak Polish: Wisława Szymborska, who I forced you to . . .

DT: No, you didn't force me to read her, but you turned me on to her. You bought her Collected Poems as a gift for me, and I ended up reading it all. I loved it.

AG: I think she's amazing, and I can't even imagine how much more amazing she must be in Polish. Do you wanna talk about what you're working on now, because it's a pretty interesting project.

DT: I’m knee-deep in this book that I always wanted to write about my friend Rachel Sherwood, who we mentioned earlier. After she died, I edited a book of her poems, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening. I think that was a way of dealing with my grief. Her death was so painful that I didn't think I'd ever really be able to write about it. I did write—20 years after the accident—a sonnet sequence about her, but, anyway, about 15 years ago I did this intensive research where I interviewed everyone who knew her, and I learned a lot more about her. I wrote a blog post about Rachel for the Poetry Foundation, which opened the door for what I’m doing now.

AG: Hello to this project.

DT: I had several false starts. I didn't want to do a straightforward prose memoir, but finally these poems started happening. And you—what are you working on now?

AG: I've been trying to write tiny plays. I don't even know if they rise to the level of actually being plays. Maybe they're more like scenes or vignettes or little half-dreams of plays or something, if that. But I'm very obsessed with it. I took a couple of playwriting classes that I loved, and I’ve always liked drama and plays, and at one point thought I wanted to be an actor. So, I'm reading tons of plays and trying to figure out if I could write some form of them.

DT: This seems like it ties into what we were talking about with your persona poems. Your use of other voices.

AG: Yeah, I like writing speeches. I love writing for voices.

DT: I admire that so much. I just want to sound like myself in my poems. I'm very selfish.

AG: I don't think it comes from being selfish. I think you're a lyric poet, and that encompasses multitudes.

DT: Anything else you wanna say?

AG: Keep writing, and don't worry so much.

DT: About the bad reviews?

AG: Or any reviews at all.

DT: At this point, yes.

AG: It's like a leaf falling into a pond. Silence. Silence is beautiful.