An Interview About Shifting Baseline Syndrome
Mordecai Martin Interviews Me About Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Poetry, Television, and Capitalism
The following interview was conducted between myself and Mordecai Martin last August. Feel free to answer the question asked of readers in the comment section below! As always, like and subscribe.
Mordecai Martin: So your work has a great deal of narrative elements in it, you’re often constructing a view point out of your poems’ speaker, even sometimes characters and plot too. I know you write fiction as well. What do you think poetry gives you that writing a prose fiction piece does not?
Aaron Kreuter: That’s a great question. I wonder how much of that comes out of my current obsession with writing prose poems; do prose poems lend themselves more readily to “narrative”? It’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure I have the answer. What I do know—and this is perhaps a roundabout way to answer your question—is that, in terms of genre, I know pretty intuitively, pretty instinctively, pretty instantly, whether something is going to be a poem or a piece of fiction. An idea, an image, an argument, an anger, a hope, whatever the seed is, nearly always comes preloaded with what form it’s going to take. For me, a poem—especially a prose poem—is a way to build energy, create patterns, string together ideas—always, always, ideas—find out what language can do. “Cousinage: A Meet Cute” and “Hydrophobia” are two good examples of that. It’s funny actually, with the new poems I’m just starting out on, I have the desire to push the narrative elements even further. I can’t wait to see where that leads.
Mordecai Martin: Looking forward to seeing how they develop over time. I think what interests me most on display in the poems is how often that narrative element mediates our access to the poem’s emotions and images without vitiating those emotions. In “Rivers I” we get the experience of being at a body of water, the exhilaration, the feelings of coolness and peace, but it’s all through this grumbling Point of View bemoaning the internet and the jadedness of the “digital native” generations. We get both, the humorous narrative conflating looking at something like google earth maps of waterways and pornography, AND the actual eroticism of being near and in water. What was the process like for that poem? You say the images come with the form, what else comes bundled together, and what comes later?
Aaron Kreuter: I love that reading of “Rivers I”! I think that what you say here is exactly right: a particular, negative discourse around pornography satirized through the bait-and-switch with the river imagery. (I also had in mind a short story from André Alexis’ 1994 collection Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, where the main character starts making videos of himself touching different fabrics, another neat stand-in for pornography). Once the idea of that rhetorical move—to call it that—came to me, the poem was set in its tracks and more or less on its way. For a poem like “Rivers I,” all the work that comes after that initial spark, the writing, the rewriting, the tinkering, the waiting, the re-rewriting, the despair, it all exists within the poem’s set boundaries, which in this case were established very early on. Other poems change their boundaries, reset their walls, throughout the writing process. As I often say, every single poem has its own way of coming into being.
Just to return to an earlier part of your question: for me, the more satiric of my poems often are dealing with more difficult subject matter. I love the flow from “oh, this is funny” to “oh, this is still funny but also extremely dark” to “oh my, what just happened, who am I, what is this world.” It’s my hope that my best poems achieve this rising energy in their readers.
Mordecai Martin: Let’s get into that difficult subject matter, or really, the element that I think unites the difficult subjects of your work: your temporal setting. These poems are stubbornly, insistently about the 21st century. In so much as they engage with the past, I’m thinking “@Herzl1860” (and not your grandparent poems, which I want to set off to the side for the moment), which engages with that past through the very real medium that we all engage with history now: the screen, the internet. Do you have a generalized theory of the moment we’re in and what poetry can say about it? Like, do you think there’s something linking the (ongoing) golden age of television to the ongoing climate catastrophe to the ongoing political crises? And how do we use poetry to get at that?
Aaron Kreuter: If I do have a generalized theory that connects all of those themes in the book that you mention, it would be capitalism. (An easy answer? Maybe. But, nonetheless, a true one.) We’re living in stark, dark (and getting darker) times. The poem “Capitalism Gets an Origin Story,” which imagines a pitch meeting for a Sopranos-type show where the main character is a personification of capitalism, speaks to that. In any case, I believe full heartedly, and full throatedly, that poetry—and literature in general—can be written to not only make sense of these dark times, but to push back against it, reject it, say fuck this, let’s build something better.
That’s an interesting reading of the collection as being mediated by the screen. And a poem like “Off Screen,” with its repeating end phrase “off screen,” would certainly corroborate it. As would the book’s cover image of a television. As would many other things.
Mordecai Martin: Yes, the book even ends on “Final(e) Thoughts,” a sweeping look at the human comedy as television. Which is interesting, because the poem, while a suitable end, feels a bit out of place with the gentler, more meditative and heartfelt back third of the book. With “On Complicity” and “Black Walnut” you get closer to a traditional nature poem, and then the tenderness of your dreams about your grandmother in “Dreams I Had the Week Before My Grandmother Passed Away.” I’m not saying that it’s all gentleness and light, there’s still the biting satire of “Everywhere Crimes” and some others, but what thought process went into that back third?
Aaron Kreuter: Ah yes: the order of the poems. Obviously, a very important aspect of a collection. For SBS, the order went through numerous changes: my own first ordering when I was getting ready to submit the collection; the reordering done with my editor; and final reordering with an eye to the flow of the book as a whole. A quick example of this: originally, and for most of the editing process, the three river poems (“Rivers I,” “Rivers II,” and “Rivers III”) were in sequential order, which is how I always imagined they would be. But once we decided to put each Rivers poem in one of the three sections (the book even being in sections was also an insight of my editor), it right away made deep narrative sense.
It can definitely be difficult to know what to do with the more lyrical poems in a collection that’s mostly satiric prose poems; the decision to put them all together in the final section came about pretty organically, I’d say. (A fair number of my more “lyrical” offerings were also cut from the collection; I’ve been thinking of putting some of them together, along with newer work, into a chapbook...) Placing “Everywhere Crimes” (one of the last poems I wrote for the book, and another example of a poem with a hopeful ending) and “Final(e) Thoughts” (the actual last poem I wrote for it) in the last section was a way to break up the more lyrical stuff, and to call back to the earlier effusiveness of the collection.
Mordecai Martin: Awesome. So you just (in your above answer) brought up your lyrical work in contrast to your narrative prose poems. I guess I want to poke at that. What’s the opposition about? Why does lyricism need a different space than narrative?
Aaron Kreuter: It’s not that lyricism needs a different space than narrative, it’s more that for the poems I’m writing right now, I tend to gravitate towards the satiric in prose poem form, and the more straightforwardly earnest in lyric form. Though, even in Shifting Baseline Syndrome, this dynamic isn’t always true: the cycle of prose poems about my grandmother, for example, are definitely more on the earnest side of the spectrum. Narrative, I believe, can be present (or absent) in any form. As I eluded to before, it almost always comes back to ideas for me, taking ideas to be a pretty all-encompassing term (images, thoughts, actions, possibilities, etcetera).
Mordecai Martin: Let’s talk about those grandparent poems, and maybe your more earnest work in general. As I said before, in poems like “@herzl1860” and “Eighteen Ways of Looking at Magneto Destroying Auschwitz…” and “The Last Six Minutes of the Nature Documentary…” you deal with history and the future as a mediated experience, something we encounter online, ironically, in movies. But your grandparent poems propose a more organic relationship with time and futurity. Can you speak to that? Are family connections enough of a link to the past to cut through the way the past is marketed to us?
Aaron Kreuter: Great question. I hope that having these various poems in conversation with each other raises this exact tension between how we access the past that you’ve brought up. Looking at it through the conceit of “shifting baseline syndrome,” how can we relate or connect to a past that is broken up into increments of the human lifespan? Poems like “Cousinage: A Meet Cute” where the poem delves into deeptime gives one answer; poems like “Montreal,” about my maternal grandmother and her life in Montreal, gives another. “Grandfather Suite,” in its mixture of lyric and prose poem, earnestness and satire, personal history and deep human time (the poem goes all the way back to “the original shallow pool dreaming the original grandfather epic”) I see as a sort of combining of the two.
Mordecai Martin: The collection works remarkably well as a whole, it’s true. How did the process of getting it together feel? Were there rejected threads or directions you avoided going?
Aaron Kreuter: At first, the poems grew pretty organically. I seem to tend to work in batches of poems, working against a particular theme or concept or idea. Once the poems reached a critical mass, as it were, I probably switched to a more willful creation/curation of the poems. Some poems, of course, didn’t make it into the final product. The collection, for a long while, was actually called “Parking Lots”; once I found its true title, that as well led to a flurry of creation. (Imagistic remnants of the old title can be found throughout the book--extra points for any reader who finds them!)
The new collection I’m slowly writing towards has a pretty large number of interconnected themes/subject matters. It’ll be interesting—as it always is to witness a creative project being born!—to see what remains in its final form (if I ever get there, of course).
Mordecai Martin: You’ll get there! So before we wrap up, I’d just like to ask a question that’s dear to me, as a writer also working with and in my Jewish heritage and on themes of Jewish culture, internal Jewish resistance to Zionism, and the North American Jewish context. What is the tradition you feel you’re working in, both Jewish and otherwise? Where do you draw strength and inspiration for the resistance necessary, the root work necessary? This can be who do you read but also who do you turn to?
Aaron Kreuter: I definitely feel very connected to the Jewish literary heritage, especially when it is firmly grounded in diaspora ethics. Writing against Zionism is an important aspect of all of my work, whether poetic, fictional, or academic. Temporal power combined with ethnic absolutism—to paraphrase Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin—is, as we see in the Israeli state, a violent disaster. In terms of who I turn to for radical sustenance: Ursula Le Guin, Edward Said, Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen, Toni Morrison. To name a few. Thinking towards different ways of living and being in the world is a major source of hope for me.
Mordecai Martin: As for all of us. Okay, so I usually like to end on asking you to craft a question that I will answer and then turn over to our readers. What do you want to ask me and them?
Aaron Kreuter: Thanks for a great interview Mordecai! To keep within the themes of the book, I’ll ask this: if we were able to start remembering in spans longer than a human life, what would you choose as the new baseline unit, and why?
Mordecai Martin: I think you raise the lovely possibility in the book of remembering within the lifespan of a body of water, a river or stream. I think that would suit me nicely. But I wonder what our readers will say!