Fast: Cooper Renner

Q & A WITH COOPER (ESTEBAN) RENNER
by Brian Beatty and Doug Martin

Q: The Quarterly was (and is) often aligned with literary minimalism. As a regular contributor to the Q, do you think that's a fair definition of the work that earned the magazine its reputation -- or how would you describe what set the Q apart?

A: I would guess that my experiences with The Quarterly, over a period of seven or eight years, and with Gordon Lish, which continue, are somewhat different than those of other writers. For one thing, I've never met Gordon in person, though we have talked on the phone. Mostly we have corresponded. For another thing, I was submitting, almost exclusively, poetry. I don't necessarily know that this made things different, but I would suspect it did. It may also be that the number of years I'd spent writing (or trying to write) before I encountered Gordon may have made a difference. I had been going at poems for almost 20 years by the time I stumbled across The Quarterly in a bookstore. A number of the earliest poems I submitted to Gordon were quite formal -- most written in quatrains, if I remember correctly -- and I would assume that Gordon was otherwise seeing mostly free verse. He wasn't opposed to formal verse at all, but he wanted it to be verse of the very highest quality. He made lots of requests for edits over the years that he was my editor.

So while I think it is mostly accurate to call The Quarterly's aesthetic 'minimalist', I'm not sure that such considerations necessarily applied in my case. Lyric poetry aims at minimalism of a certain sort anyway, doesn't it? Of course there are varying sorts of minimalism, predominately (perhaps) minimalism of language and minimalism of plot or structure. Gordon didn't exclusively run flash fiction. One issue of The Quarterly was taken up almost entirely with a novel by a woman whose name I can't remember. There were Rick Bass stories which were quite long, and Paulette Jiles's Jesse James series of poems. I feel that Gordon didn't want any kind of extraneous verbiage in the writing, whether fiction or verse. He wrote to me once that I was letting (or maybe tending to let) language (or maybe he said "rhetoric") run away with me -- whether he meant that generally or, perhaps, specifically in relation to the poem we were dealing with, I can't recall.

As for what set The Quarterly apart, there are several things, the first being that most literary magazines of any stature or heft are not guided by the editorial vision of one person. It was also true that Gordon was not concerned to cater to the already established writers who didn't need The Quarterly, nor was he at all interested in any kind of conventional definition of "good writing", much of which comes from already established writers. I see him as primarily eager to get the freshest words and thoughts and images in front of the public: he may be the first person I encountered (the second would be Deron Bauman) who had the correct scalpel. The point wasn't to preserve what "the writer wanted to say"; the point was to preserve and enhance and increase the sharp writing. Cut away the bad writing, even if what is left presents an entirely different story or poem than what was originally intended. What was originally intended doesn't matter; catering to the writer's ego doesn't matter -- fresh writing matters. Isn't this exactly the same thing that Pound did for The Waste Land?

The Quarterly didn't run advertisements; its cartoons often weren't "funny" in any sort of New Yorker sense -- they were pointed and different and fresh; it would give ten or twenty or forty pages over to one writer in one issue. And it looked even more like a book, instead of a magazine, than The Paris Review!

Q: Why do you think Gordon Lish has developed such a divisive reputation?

A: I'm sure some writers would say that some of the controversy is personal, having to do with personal encounters. But again, I haven't met Gordon in person, so I can't comment on that. In the ways that matter, beyond a place and time or beyond the politics of catering to the egos of Pulitzer Prize winners, Gordon's work is -- and will likely remain -- divisive for the same reason that Pound's was and is: because what has import to him is the language on the page, not the sociology of the language, not the cult of personality. If Hemingway sends you a bad story, you don't publish it because it's Hemingway and will sell copies; you reject it because you can't waste pages on bad writing. I admire that aesthetic tremendously.

Q: For all the work that appears in a monthly update to elimae, how much work do you reject? What are the most common reasons you reject a submission?

A: I don't keep track or count of submissions accepted or received, so I could only guess. I reject more than I accept, to be sure. One could be pompous and say, "I reject bad writing," but it would be more accurate, I imagine, to say that I reject writing that doesn't meet my aesthetic standards. In many cases, such writing may be what most of us would call "bad" -- hackneyed, or stereotypical, or posed instead of real. In other cases, it is writing that is perfectly accomplished, but which is not what I am interested in promoting, as an editor, or reading as a reader. It's writing that doesn't "fit" elimae. To the best of my ability, I want elimae under my editorship to be as good as it was under Deron's editorship; I would like it to be as good as The Quarterly. I don't know that I will ever achieve such a lofty goal. But my personal tastes aren't necessarily the key, as it were: sometimes I publish writing which offends me, but which is strong, fresh, capable writing. As the disclaimers sometimes say, "The opinions expressed herein are not those of the staff." What do I look for, put as cogently as I can? I look for the writing in which the word is a brushstroke, well applied. It's the manner of the brushstroke that matters; not the fact that it's creating an image of a sunflower.

Q: What print or online publications do you consider to be consistently interesting?

A: The "major print" publications are almost invariably hideous, yes? I read Poetry primarily for the back matter, which I often enjoy very much. The poetry I generally don't enjoy. And, as awful as this is to admit, I do very little "reading" on the Internet: if I'm reading on the web, it's likely to be about politics or music. And of course Deron Bauman's group blog (to which I contribute), Clusterflock. There is a wealth of material at Mike Neff's Web Del Sol, though again I don't read a great deal. I see so much material as editor of elimae that I devote most of my other reading time to books. Yes, I have an iPod, but books are what I adore.

Q: One of your poems is entitled "A Line from Donald Justice, Mangled." You also refer to James Wright, Hardy, and Yeats, among others, in your work. How important is the prosodic traditional to you when you sit down to compose a poem?

A: That's a really difficult question to answer, not least because it's been so long since I've composed a new draft! As well as I can tell, a poem begins for me generally in the form of a few words--an image, perhaps, or a statement of emotion--which somehow hook me and lead me to explore what made me want to play with them. That's probably not a very clear explanation. I think that I very soon, after being hooked by that short sequence of words, tend to decide if the forward progress of the words will be formal or free. A fairly recent poem like "Altamira" (fairly recent meaning that I composed it, I'm pretty sure, in the summer of 2005, though it may have been earlier), a poem which cites Yeats, almost certainly wouldn't have come about if I hadn't been reading Yeats at the time and encountered that phrase "the first dead", which apparently struck me in another sense than Yeats's, perhaps because I was thinking of Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness. Yeats's words made me think of a character being conscious, for the first time, of death and of those who have died; a character retaining a memory of that, which we consider to be a characteristic of the legitimately human. This poem was not the first, I think, that I drafted that summer in what I consider a Yeatsian mode, spurred by the (re)reading I was doing. Yeats would not, I think, have composed such a poem, would not have been taken by such a concept; but to me it moves like Yeats's poetry: Yeats filtered through Esteban, perhaps. "Uncle Silas," which you published in Snowvigate if I remember correctly, would have come about within the same rough time period and perhaps more obviously reflects Yeatsian manners--variant line lengths, more blatant (if you will) slant rhymes, more obscure references. I like beautifully handled formal poems. It may have something to do with growing up with the hymnal and with folk songs. Or it may just be a response to music in general. I love the ballad (or, if you will, the hymnal) quatrain. That very simple form opens itself up to so many formal manipulations: rhyme, slant-rhyme, subtracting a line-foot, etc. But obviously I love beautifully handled free verse as well.

Q: My favorite image in Mosefolket is the goldfish eyes escaping in the feces in "Merriman Swallows a Goldfish Whole, 1957." What is the story behind that specific poem?

A: Again, a hard question to answer. At some point, perhaps as "early" as the late '70s, I composed a sort of novel in verse, mostly free verse, inspired both (I believe) by William Meredith's Hazard the Painter and Donald Justice's "Tremayne" poems. My central character was named Merriman, and I wanted to take the reader through 4 or 5 decades of a more or less "typical" mid-century American male's life in the space of maybe a couple of dozen short poems. The poem you mention, however, was not part of that early sequence. I suspect the poem came about in the early days of Gordon Lish accepting my poems for The Quarterly. I was going back through my catalog, as it were, looking for poems that had never been published but which, I thought, Gordon might like. I probably dragged out one or two of the older Merriman and somehow got the idea for that newer Merriman as a consequence. I couldn't say for sure. The tone of the first stanza is very much like the earlier Merriman poems. The second and third stanzas are much more like something I would have composed under Lish's influence or thinking in such a way as to please him. I'm glad you like the poem, though I wouldn't have imagined its rating so highly.

Q: I am curious as to your writing process. How quickly does the first draft come? How many drafts do you normally go through until the poem has talked enough to you and feels as complete as it can get?

A: When I get an idea for a poem, when the Muse visits me, a first draft can come very quickly, in a sitting (or, in many cases, in a walking, followed by a sitting. I used to get quite a number of poems from bits of language that occurred to me while walking or, even, driving.) Now surely at least part of the reason a poem can be drafted in one sitting is because so many of my poems are so short, but part of it may also be the "finger exercises"--the dozens, the hundreds, of poems I have written over the years, and destroyed. How many drafts will the poem go through? There is no norm. Some poems may come almost fully formed, in the first draft. Others have been tinkered with repeatedly. A formal poem offers a lot more potential for drafting and re-drafting, because one can think of so many different rhymes for a certain word, or so many sequences of syllables to fill a certain gap, or so on. The formal sequence, "Silence in Heaven," which has been published only in a limited edition, went through the wringer, going back and forth between Gordon and me, even after going through my own wringer before he saw it. As it worked out, he decided not to use the poem, but I got a lot of free one-on-one teaching, as the poems in the sequence went back and forth in the mail between us.

A free verse poem doesn't, at least for me, suggest so many "openings" because there is no certain way it "needs" to be. It can, on the other hand, be much easier to hack at and winnow away a free verse poem, because there is no set form one is trying to preserve through the winnowing.

Cooper (Esteban) Renner is the editor of elimae. His new and selected poems, entitled Mosefolket, was recently published by Alhambra Press.

Brian Beatty and his beard have published extensively.

Doug Martin is the editor at Snow*Vigate