Interview

Your title Horror Vacui is a Latin phrase that means "fear of empty spaces." Could you talk about the significance of this phrase and what it means to you?


Horror vacui is a phrase that is often employed to describe the psychological and aesthetic impetus behind a range of very different forms of artistic practice, from Islamic tile patterns, to the canvases of Gustav Klimt and those of the folk artist Richard Dadd, and, most importantly for my own book, the arrangement of Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscript pages, where text and image run flush from margin to margin. Although these works originate out of diverse contexts, they seem to possess a shared sense of anxiety over the presence of empty space, vacuums, lacunae, visual silences, bare ground, or any manifestation of absence. Such work seems, to me, to respond to this condition with a nearly obsessive principle of design, one that entails anxiously but patiently marking or filling with image or text any gaps or interstices. I selected Horror Vacui as the title for this collection of poems because it resonated for me on multiple levels, from the aesthetic to the emotional to the spiritual. The idea that emptiness or absence might be the primary condition of one’s art—that is, that one’s work is a response to that which both is missing from it and anterior to it—is compelling for me. Art—or at least some art—then is not a record of a lost object or a lost beloved or god, but an expression of one’s understanding that what is gone was never possessed, never one’s simply to elegize, but one’s to, paradoxically, exorcize as well. At some level my work at once mourns this condition—which I distinguish from this person or that object, even though the poem is always a response to something concrete and particular—and conceals it behind an onslaught of images and words.



In continuing with the theme of "empty spaces," your poems are full of them. As in Sappho’s poems, much of the tension and emotional intensities exist within what is missing on the blank, white page. Would you agree?



Yes. The blank page is there before the poem imprinted on top of it turns it from a "positive" field into a "negative" one. Some of my favorite poets—I think in particular of Paul Celan—respond to silence with a controlled and severe minimalism. This is not my dominant aesthetic, though it is one I admire and use at times. In Horror Vacui "empty spaces" are thematically, figuratively, and formally incorporated into the poems. I realized on rereading the book that it is full of holes—zeros, wells, circles, windows, and the like. Several of the poems—including the title piece—are also in fairly narrow, justified columns, which leave much of the page bare. These poems are meant to visually allude to the narrow margins of the illuminated manuscripts I referred to earlier. One of the most stunning of these is the Prayer Book of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, which is an exceptionally rare specimen because the monks who made it used an expensive black ink to fill in all the whiteness of its pages, which amount to a sustained dirge and celebration. I selected a detail from this "black prayer book" for the cover of Horror Vacui because it correlates with the book’s theme of loss, but also because I liked the way it beautifully turns text into a kind of image. I think too that there is a dialectical interplay between the marks on a page that make up the words we read and the counterpointing empty spaces that might erase them. When I write, all of this is operating at some unacknowledged level. It is only after I am finished writing do I begin to see what it is I’ve made.



Visually, your work varies greatly from poem to poem. How did you decide how each piece should be laid out on the page?



Often I experimented with different arrangements until I found one that worked best, which usually would entail more writing and rewriting. In narrow, claustrophobic spaces pressure is built up and things fracture, break down, and distort. I wanted to explore the creative possibilities of this in Horror Vacui, especially with the "Examination" poems which are loosely modeled on work by the seventeenth-century American poet and Puritan minister Edward Taylor. Taylor wrote a series of poems which he titled Preparatory Meditations and God’s Determinations; they were meant to be private speech-acts which Taylor sometimes addressed to God and sometimes to himself and which were never meant to be published. They are difficult, intense, and at times hallucinatory poems that he would write and recite to himself before administering communion to his congregation. I wanted the "Examination" poems similarly to be searching interrogations of the spirit and the psyche, internal monologues in which the self was either split and turned in upon itself or dialogues in the form of a call and response in which the self was answering to something higher. The two "voices" in the poems are meant to be read separately and then blended together. I thought the merging and breaking of voice, image, and syntax would be most highly dramatized if the poems were visually contained in tight margins. Someone once told me that my poems in columns visually resemble newspaper prose, and that he found this both disarming and disconcerting. The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but it seems apt.



The epigraph to your collection is by Thomas Gray: "No farther seek his merits to disclose, / Or draw his frailties from their dread abode / (There they alike in trembling hope repose), / The bosom of his Father and his God." What drew you to this excerpt?



I’ve always loved the brooding and melancholic Graveyard Poets, especially Gray. The epigraph is from the concluding lines of his most famous poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." I chose them for Horror Vacui’s epigraph because they set in motion so many of the same ideas I am exploring, such as how the human becomes the divine, how the father becomes the Father.



This collection is dedicated to your father and many of these poems deal with his death. What was the process of creating these poems?



The death of my father led to a lot of new writing for me, which in turn drew upon themes that had long been present in my work and gave them added resonance and more urgency. My parents divorced when I was quite young and because my mother and I moved away, my relationship with my father was formed at a great distance. Both the physical and temporal space between us was immense and, at times, seemingly insurmountable. His absence is a pronounced presence in much of Horror Vacui, but it is not a presence that is rendered in recognizably biographical ways. I wrote the collection’s title poem, as well as some other poems in the book, as a way of knowing him. But I found that he became increasingly unknowable the more that I pursued him in writing. Poetry—if it is doing its job—does not add to our insight of the world, does not add to our collective understanding by making the world knowable. Rather, it both reveals and makes the world strange, until we feel, upon reading it, that we are stranger to ourselves. My father haunts the poems in this book, but they haunt—by which I mean "run after"—him in return.