THE ABC'S OF POETRY: AN INTERVIEW WITH KARL ELDER PART ONE

Karl Elder's newest book, Mead, was published last month by Marsh River Editions. Mead is a collection of twenty-six experiments in a mode called the "abcedarium," or poetry which uses the twenty-six letters of the alphabet as starting point in some fashion. Elder is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including Phobophobia, A Man in Pieces, The Geocryptogrammatist's Pocket Compendium of the United States, and The Minimalist's How-to Handbook. He is the Fessler Professor of Creative Writing and Poet in Residence at Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the fellow who asked me to teach a course in "Writing Creative Nonfiction" at the college in fall of 2004. He consented to to do an interview with me via e-mail in September, 2005, and as you'll see he handled the task with grace and charm and some small bit of humor.

Montag: Give us, if you would, a working definition of the abecedarium as a poetic form.

Elder: It’s the implementation of successive letters of the alphabet in any manner imaginable—as one example, 26 consecutive words, all of which begin with a different letter, in alphabetical order, a through z.

Montag: Some of the abecedariums in Mead recognize the form of what you're doing and play with that recognition, e.g. the first lines of "Sleepover":

A is for the last letter in zebra,
b being third and first in the word bra.
See, there is this real old junior high joke.

And in some of the poems the form is seamlessly integrated, that is, it sounds something like blank verse rather than like an abecedarium - for instance, in "Sound" we read:

"An almost voice" was how the child described
both the groan of the ice and the quiet
created by it, the latter of which
didn't seem to happen second or first,
exactly, but overlap as though snow
falling to rise higher had smothered one
ghost in the form of the child's reflection,
having inspired another appearing
in the garb of white noise, a whisper in
January begun as June thunder.

When and how do you know which kind of poem a particular abecedarium will be, and what factors influence that choice?

Elder: Well, I think that in order to be clear it’s necessary that I identify the particular characteristics of the abecedarium I happened to settle upon—very much by accident, by the way, perhaps never having heard the term abecedarium, though certainly aware that others, such as James Merrill, had used the device.

I often compose initial drafts in spiral notebooks. I was surprised one day to find that the pages of the notebook in front of me contained what I imagined were the same number of lines as a Big Chief tablet, which many of our generation used in the early grades of elementary school. Lord knows what possessed a grown man to count blank spaces, but by the time I got to 13, I felt my eyes widening. It seemed like I’d hit the jackpot when I came up with precisely 26.

Suddenly, then, I’m thinking about using syllabics, since I’d had luck with the mode previously and because I’d recently returned to Stevens for some less-than-leisurely reading, during which I’d observed him counting to good effect. It struck me that it would be cool to pump out 70 poems (the number of sheets in the notebook, its brand name Mead) that had a uniform look, and I decided to try making a poem of 260 syllables with each of the lines bearing 10, in part because my rather sprawling handwriting fills a line with about ten syllables when I begin at the ready-made margin at the left of the sheet.

After having composed three or four Mead poems, I moved to other forms for quite a while. I thought that because my plan had so monopolized my nights, I’d never in my lifetime finish 70. I returned to the form only after it occurred to me—duh—that I didn’t have to write 70.

Much of the above is to suggest that the work was composed over long stretches of time for which many influences crept into the making. That served my purposes, since—while I wanted the poems to appear alike at a glance—I sought to create tension by deliberately infusing each piece of the sequence with its own personality. I soon discovered a way to do so was to follow the lead of the first line of the piece, assuming, of course, that I sensed through some nuance like sound—sometimes subtle—that I’d hit upon a tone sufficiently different from the tone of pieces I’d already written.

Getting started in my version of abecedarium isn’t difficult. For one thing, sentences are often begun with an article; the same applies to roughly ten of the first lines of the Mead poems. I’d complete a poem and then be on alert for a musical phrase, maybe, or whatever might spark the imagination and began with an a. I’d hear quite a number of those phrases—generated by others in conversation or spontaneously sounding in my head—that I’d reject. Then a phrase I couldn’t resist would surface, or, sometimes, one with ten syllables would pop up, as in "A pox on talk of the apocalypse."

What, finally, I want to say in direct response to your question is that I never conceived of having two types of abecedarium—seamless and (do I dare coin an adjective here?) autoscriptive. My energy was focused upon creating 26 very different poems using the same form.

Montag: I can imagine that finding words for the tougher letters (q, x, z) might be something you need to do early on, because words in those positions could so radically re-direct the poem. For instance, in "The Resignation" I think you must certainly have had the z before you knew where the poem was going. How do you handle those tough letters in relation to the poem, and the poem in relation to them?

Elder: Believe me, I understand the reasoning here with respect to "The Resignation," but your scenario simply doesn’t match my recollection. In fact, having taken a close look at the first draft, it appears to me that I got stuck, horribly stuck, after line 24.

Oh, I have made lists of words that begin with q and x and z—my block and tackle to pull myself out of the holes—but the z word necessary to round off "The Resignation" wasn’t on the list.

I thought I knew patience until I met Mead. The poems required of me, on average, including the several drafts, about three hours per line, I figure. Sometimes I seemed to have wooed Lady Luck, but she’s the original slut. The only way out of certain predicaments was to stay stuck. Often, the more I spun my wheels, the deeper I got, which, ironically, seemed to feel right, though the rational half of me pictured the other half as something akin to a dog digging for chopsticks. But, mustering the determination to remain with the problem, having scanned my experience for a solution and having come up blank, I’d start adding vowels to the "tough" letters, then consonants, saying the sound of the combination aloud in my head. In time, there was always a solution. And I judged its effectiveness by way of the intensity of the rush felt in the forebrain when I hit upon an answer.

Now, granted, q and x and z are quite difficult, "tough," as you say. But the true bitch is k. Y is of the identical cloth. And j is no stroll in the park.

Continued at Part Two, below....