Interview with David Axelrod on Years Beyond the River — December 20, 2021
David Axelrod was born in 1958 in Alliance, Ohio, where he grew up working in his family’s auto wrecking business. Educated in public schools, he studied with Richard Hugo and Patricia Goedicke at the University of Montana, where he earned his MFA. After working as an ad designer at the Missoulian, he earned his Ph.D in Modern Literatures at Ohio University. He is the author of nine collections of poetry and two collections of nonfiction, including, most recently, Years Beyond the River (Terrapin Books, 2021) and The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence (Oregon State University Press, 2019). His poems and essays appear in many journals, among them: About Place, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Kenyon Review, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, and Verse Daily. He taught at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande from 1988 to 2020, as well as at the Ludwigsburg Educational University in Baden-Würrtemburg, Germany. Along with his spouse and colleague, Jodi Varon, he founded the award-winning basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts. They also are co-founders of EOU’s low residency Masters Program in Creative Writing, as well as the Wilderness, Ecology and Community program, affiliated with the MFA. He currently serves as the director of the MFA and WEC, and is a contributing editor to Lynx House Press. He makes his home in Missoula, Montana.
Christopher Nelson: Evident in your poems is a love for the natural world. Abundant here is the stunning variety of birds, flowers, and trees, yet there is a deep uneasiness from vanished glaciers, dammed rivers, and woods ravaged by fire and saw. How do you reconcile your love of the natural world with the facts of human destructiveness, and does poetry reconcile?
David Axelrod: I ask my students often to please jettison the word Nature as it isn't really a useful term anymore, if in fact it ever was useful or accurate. Bill McKibben got at this point ages ago, talking about how Nature as we have used the term in the past no longer exists as a place apart, separate from human influence. Well, that assumes it did exist as he described it, but we all are aware today of how our conception of Nature allowed for European Modernity to colonize and pulverize life on this planet. In my mind Nature immediately sets up a set of false binaries we cherish and cling to—Nature and Civilization, object and subject, female and male, passive and active, virgin and corrupt, purifying and emasculating, intuitive and rational. It's a tiresome cultural trope and misrepresents reality. This is especially evident now, given how our subjective gaze is being undermined by the pandemic and global warming.
In my poems, I want to try to get at something more immersive than Nature or the natural world. Immersed in very large finitudes, to borrow a term from Timothy Morton, these poems aren't about places elsewhere that we visit on Sunday or for two weeks in August. Sure, there are built environments that are soul-deadening, I write about those too, but those soul-deadening places are just as immersed as a cedar grove in the Cabinet Mountains. In a poem I have yet to write, everything alive is a likely agent, a little shy or stand-offish, autonomous, but in relation with others, and possibly aware of and watching others. Also, a little unnervingly, those others may even be evaluating us as allies. We're correct, that is, to feel uneasy about the collapse of life we live in the midst of, but I also am personally filled with wonder, an erotic wonder really, at the resilience of those lives that inhabit this place and time.
Does poetry reconcile? Perhaps so. But we've also seen in recent years how dismally it can divide writers and readers into warring camps. As much as I understand these conflicts, we're all of us immersed in a time where everything else is unmoored, uncertain, liminal. Does the future even have a future? That is the immersion I mentioned earlier, and that shared experience may be what drives our conflicts and is the source of our anxieties, too, but it’s also what unites us. The Blue Horizon isn't going to carry us away. That would be the worst possible outcome! The planet sticks to us like goo. We all have that in common.
People who despair of poetry are fond of Auden famously saying, "poetry makes nothing happen," and therefore poetry sucks because "making things happen" is some kind of carbon-heavy masculine virtue. In the subsequent lines Auden contradicts or proves himself wrong: "[poetry] survives, / A way of happening, a mouth." I'm all for that mouth and the little human cry it makes. The mouth of lyricism! The lyric, like language itself, mourns that it can only name or approximate a world, but it is our beautiful, physically resonant tool. We can feel it in our heads and chests, sometimes it even makes us dance and moan. Auden claimed something else to the effect that poetry is the clear expression of mixed emotions. And that may speak a little more practically to the question of reconciliation. Poems aren't troubled by contradiction, in fact that might be their fuel. They don't resist contradiction but are able to absorb it, make a place for things as they are and are not. That no doubt has something to do with how poems are in relation with whatever else constellates a moment. That's why I tell my students poems await their poet—the poems already exist and it's our work to be attuned and develop the skills the poem subsequently demands of us.
Is that attunement an act of language reconciling itself with others? A magpie just came to the window and said (I think), "It's time to move on…"
Nelson: I appreciate the thorough and thoughtful response. It makes me think of your poem “Pity Divides the Soul and Man Unmans,” in which a forest isn’t a forest anymore but a crop, and the two people in the poem stop being people exactly. The so-called “natural world” isn’t separate anymore—and as you say, maybe never was. Is the cost of our dualistic thinking destruction? Or more cynically perhaps, I wonder if humankind’s destructiveness isn’t perfectly natural. We seem to have a very long history of it, preceding even the agricultural revolution; the human-caused extinctions of megafauna, for example.
Axelrod: Your second question here is a difficult one for me, but first I wonder if it seems I’m arguing for a previous condition, one in which our thinking and actions were better integrated into an ecology of relations? A Golden Age? I’m skeptical of that myth, to say the least. That previous condition, if it ever existed and whatever it might have been, is hard to find any evidence of, though what I’m getting at is something like what Zen Buddhism calls “original face”—our face before our own parents were born!
As to the question of our inherent destructiveness, the theory that Clovis people drove the late Pleistocene megafauna extinction comes with some major caveats. I mean, the causes aren’t entirely clear. Whatever caused thirty-five genera to go extinct eleven or so millennia in the past, the timing places those events at the amorphous boundary between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. It’s a murky, uncertain place in time. There was a change in the climate then, too, and late Ice Age floods became a broad cultural memory, a part of a story we still recall. Certainly, too, it’s an inflection point where all our troubles might be traced to their sources. I always think of Gilgamesh as standing there at that border between worlds, crying out into the darkness of the past from which he (and we) emerged, pre-wounded it seems by our self-awareness. Are we destructive by nature? Gilgamesh surely was, often in response to the delimited aspect of his power. But is our destructiveness perfectly natural? I hesitate to say yes. It’s certainly always available.
There’s a huge whitetail buck who lives on our place and environs. I may have encountered a younger version of his majesty the summer before, down nearer to the creek. More recently, he rested on a small rise above me, in a patch of lupine and balsamroot. He stood up and looked twenty feet tall, with seven tines on each antler. He looked like god as he bounded off. I’d protected a grove of young aspens I planted last spring, but it wasn’t long until he pushed his way into the exclosure and raked and broke in half one two-inch trunk. Previously, he’d confined scratching his itch to a thicket of invasive white poplars, and I was more or less content to let him have at it. But with the aspens, it felt like he was bullying my friends. Yesterday, I stepped out and saw he’d done the same now to a rescued linden I planted as a mate for a mature linden; overnight, he completely raked away the bark, nearly girdling the tree. That took a lot of doctoring, and I’m not confident the tree will survive. He’s in rut and I imagine testosterone has him agitated more than usual. Is he being destructive? Is he acting with deliberate malice? Or just thoughtless in the way I was as a younger man?
I later exchanged a few words with René Descartes in the forest. He was clearly visiting Missoula with friends and family for Thanksgiving. They were pushing baby carriages and cajoling their various kiddos. He stopped us and remarked that “They had walked a long way already.” They had walked precisely 1.7 miles (so the sign said anyway). The so-called great philosopher then inquired, maybe a little exasperated with the whole of the Rattlesnake Recreation Area, if “there is anything else worth seeing ahead?” That worth caused me to wonder if Descartes had learned anything in the past 425 years. What a privileged correlationist! His solipsism was showing. What’s worth seeing depends I guess on what one is capable of seeing, but that’s hardly the fault of the objects that remain unseen. I told him, “It depends,” and left it at that. Regardless, I felt I was being coerced into a system of valuation that feels implicitly violent.
The problem, as “Pity Divides the Soul and Man Unmans” embodies it, is valuation, the manner in which our human subject relates to objects within our gaze. If the value of trees is found in “board feet” of processed timber, we’re living in a system that operates blind and distorts all relations. As the poem’s images make clear, a lot of unplanned outcomes unfold from that market valuation of trees. We’ve seen this, too, in some of the “get back to work, slaves!” attitude expressed during the pandemic. I wrote a piece responding to a deeply offensive statement from the Lieutenant Governor of Texas who said, early in the pandemic, something sinister to the effect, “There are things more important than living.” You can find it on the Terrain website, among their Letters to America. And that poem is expressive, I think, of a way of revaluing life that’s neither violent nor destructive. In that sense, it may be about allyship.
The title, “Pity Divides the Soul and Man Unmans,” comes from Blake’s Milton, and these are the words of Los as he looks upon “the Mills.” In the poem from Years Beyond the River, the poet is faltering, having second thoughts, and reprimanding himself for pretending he can live imaginatively outside the same system of valuations as Los mourns when he looks upon factories and those who have been granted one day of rest from their soul numbing and alienated labor. You might say that the speaker in my poem is having a so-called “beautiful soul” moment and calling out the hypocrisy of it. I understand Blake to mean something different, though; to feel pity is to accept that a differential exists in being, a relational gap dividing one soul from another.
Nelson: Can you talk about the haunting in these poems, which I experience as both the residual force of what once was and an absence of something we can't comprehend—as if the past isn't just a different time but a world impossible to know?
Axelrod: There's an essay, "Accretions of Absence," in The Eclipse I Call Father, in which I try to unpack that phenomenon. My wife and I often worked, lived, researched, and wrote abroad during a ten-year period of our lives when our children were grown and we felt unmoored. My collections What Next, Old Knife? and The Open Hand are documents of this time.
During those sojourns abroad, we were struck again and again by the way we would encounter the past. A massive gravitational force seemed to have distorted space and time, though we only on occasion glimpsed some aspect of it. What to make of the beautiful new train station when you realize it's built on top of the forced labor camp whose inmates, mostly political prisoners, died of typhus and were buried in a mass grave the mayor was forced to stand before as the allies forced the city to disinter the dead? Or this threshing circle overlooking the pastoral valley where they executed villagers during the Thirty Years War and left their bodies for the wolves. It's called Wolf Howling for a reason. It could be something as vivid, too, as finding our own names in lists of the murdered and disappeared in Eastern Europe, ten or fifteen years before our births, and decades more since our families left those regions and their chronic sorrows. But it could also be a doorway that we passed by dozens of times before we realized that it opened into a courtyard across which there was a staircase and at the top of the stairs was a room that opened into others, where we encountered a shared past so intimate all we imagined to be true about ourselves and our families dissolved. It seldom failed to unnerve us.
But why must one travel in order to sense the depth of time in its layers? What would it mean, I wonder in that essay, to try to sense that same residual force in more familiar environs, the sorts of places we're so familiar with the surfaces of, day to day we don't even see them anymore?
That was an important motivation for writing Years Beyond the River.
I'm pleased that you feel the "haunting in these poems" as that is very much something I too felt present in the moment, as it were, when certain of these poems insinuated themselves into my awareness. Yes, a residual force. How, for example, in the poem “A Message Passed Between Twilights,” the memory of an indigenous woman lives on (faint and demeaning) in the term used to name the place she lived on the map. What is present and alive there today as then and who or what may recall her? The name we remember her by, “Squaw Creek,” suggests history and violence found her there, too. The stench of violence hasn't diminished. I can't speak for her, of course, but I can at least try to better see her in whatever endures from that time before history arrived, and the way men have subsequently disgraced her and the place she lived.
It's a reckoning, I suppose, though I hesitate to call it a reconciliation. Perhaps you are correct, it's a world impossible to know. But there is that cobble in the poem (it's on a pedestal just outside my window now, glowing in sunlight). I carried it home in my pack from that place half a lifetime ago. It was from a stratum of mud on a basalt ridge at 7,000 feet, where there had been a river emptying into the ocean, when that same place was the edge of the continent. Maybe there is an intricate mesh of things it's a part of that we can hardly imagine but that passes messages across time and distance? This is crazy talk, I know, but I don't care. It's a physical not metaphysical phenomenon I'm trying to describe. I'm in no position to say for sure, but I trust poems to try to show the ways that mesh shines at the nodes where the threads intersect.
Nelson: And they do shine. One thing I love about these poems is that while the past might be a world impossible to know, I feel I’m given some kind of access to it through your images, your words. I’m reminded of “Soaking the Thirst Bag” and “Lastness,” where it could be the present or the 18th century or the 3rd or the 30th. Another definition (or dimension) of nature is that timelessness, that which lasts through (and despite) it all, and of which we are a part but only in a small way. To think of nature this way sort of takes dominion out of the equation.
Axelrod: Yes, there’s something uncanny at work there and it’s deliberate in as much as I was and still am trying to find a poetic language attuned to the era in which I find myself alive now, or more accurately, growing old.
I think, too, I look toward Tranströmer here as a guide. There are moments in his poems, as in “Solitary Swedish Houses,” when a hand reaches through a window and releases an owl from an interior room, or the window “into the earth” at the end of “The Half-Finished Heaven,” that send a tremor of deep time through me. Poems like “Below Zero” and “The Cuckoo,” also have that same effect. One of his late poems, “Snow Is Falling” is another that I think is brilliant—three brief successive images vanishing into time.
For example, “Soaking the Thirst Bag” tries to suss out what I felt walking in a fire scar along the South Fork of the Imnaha River, during another active fire season and ongoing drought. I felt oppressed by its scale and how it affects not only me and my intimate companion, but every living being besides. We’re all in it together. As I wrote Years Beyond the River, I was much indebted to Timothy Morton’s idea about our living in the era of hyperobjects, “very large finitudes” he calls them, that have undermined our conventional sense of human subjectivity. Global warming reveals us to ourselves and each other as “weak,” “lame,” and prone to the hypocrisies of the beautiful soul. That couple in “Soaking the Thirst Bag” are a mess, life itself is a mess, and they find momentary reprieve, but only to face a future of ongoing losses.
That couple though are a bit unmoored in time and could be facing this crisis at any point past, present, or future. That may be what accounts for both the archaic and speculative effect. The same is true in “Lastness,” whose couple is similarly “bestirred.” As I wrote these two poems, and it’s true of the entire collection, too, whenever I was confronted with a choice between a Latinate word and a word rooted in Old English, I chose the latter word even if it reeked a bit of archaism. Latin is brilliant; it’s so flexible it allows you to say or define almost anything or phenomenon, but it lacks that darker drum beat I hear in Old English and prefer. That’s something I thought I heard as a young man reading Galway Kinnell’s poetry, and heard particularly in The Book of Nightmares, a book that to me felt pitched to a similar degree of dark urgencies as Years Beyond the River.
I agree with your observation about dominion. Dominion is predicated on the privilege we’ve granted our human perspective. The Anthropocene is the unnerving result of that privilege. It’s hard for me not to think the unravelling of just about everything we assumed to be stable cascades from this privilege being revealed as completely blockheaded. We’ve humiliated ourselves—what else can explain the violent denial in reaction to the obvious? As an aside though, I recalled yesterday as I was out gazing in wonder at lichens and mosses in the forest, that as my companion and I were hiking up the South Fork of the Imnaha, we found ourselves hundreds of feet above the river and walking in muck, then over twigs—good grief, beavers had returned not to the fire scar, but to a creek high above the river, dammed it and created a wetland. Now why in the world did I leave that out of the poem, “Soaking the Thirst-Bag”? The beavers were politely dissenting from my persistent melancholy!
Nelson: Perhaps like all lyric poetry, Years Beyond the River is also about death and time. (I’m reminded that Galway Kinnell thought he was dying when writing the poems of The Book of Nightmares.) The speaker’s reflections on childhood, the sister, the aging mother, the decades of shared love and shared scars—I enjoy how these poems wed, even conflate, the passage of personal time with immemorial time.
Axelrod: The title, Years Beyond the River, refers broadly to the period of time in Judaism after the Babylonian exile. The eponymous poem refers to temporal recurrence on a scale many degrees of magnitude greater than we mean when we refer to déjà vu. And the poem has obvious personal referents. In as much as death and time are an inevitable topic of lyric poetry, not to mention the melancholy I joked about moments ago, their attraction as topics is fueled by longing. That longing is a tenderness toward life, joy, and desire for increase. Maybe even for a future. I always feel heartened, bolstered even, by lyric poetry, because the lyric does conflate personal and immemorial time. There’s a wonderful chapbook of translations by Ezra Pound that New Directions published in 1960, Love Poems of Ancient Egypt. Here’s a lyric a young woman sang 5,000 years ago:
I find my love fishing His feet in the shallows.
We have breakfast together and drink beer.
I offer the magic of my thighs He is caught in the spell.
What’s not to like here? I’m so for this couple! And what over all these generations beyond the river has changed? I feel my hoary feet rejuvenated by that exquisite, warm silt in the Nile. I mean, I recognize these two lovers, in fact I’m 93.7% certain that I’m the spellbound one. She too enfolds me, eagerly. I will love her forever. But what’s in the beer, I wonder, because I’m also trembling with grief and isn’t that strange? This strangeness is in everything, and maybe given poignancy by the fact that language isn’t what it names, which is sometimes characterized as a failure of language. Isn’t it just the opposite? There’s a gap into which time, memory, and our little flickering selves flood. Language makes a space for that strangeness to keep moving. The singer and the spellbound one themselves are enfolded by this strangeness.
By the way, the next lyric in that series expresses quite the opposite though no less familiar emotion. Let’s lay that ending of loving relations aside and consider instead going on, as you say, through “the decades of shared love and shared scars.” Aging was much on my mind as I wrote Years Beyond the River, but subsequently, I realized, as in my essay, “The Old Marriage,” from The Eclipse I Call Father, the awareness and knowledge of relations over time don’t come to rest. There’s no finality, no permanent insight, just unfolding until death, but even then, I wonder.
Think of death in terms of dreams. You’re done with a person, a place, a house, a room, and yet you return to these in dreams, and the uncanny thing is, though you recognize it all, the places, objects, and people all have changed. It’s as though these familiar places, objects, and people have continued to evolve without you. How weird is that? Even in your dreams, their histories go on without you until you briefly intersect them years later. There’s really nothing woo-woo about this, by the way; rather, it’s just a vivid reminder that ours isn’t the privileged perspective, nor are we the privileged subject.
I have to fess up, though: in this life, I never had a sister, though I love her no less for that! I’m referring here to the poems “Balk” and “Crossing into the Deep North.” These poems were written in the flooded gap I just described.
Nelson: Can you tell us about the beautiful and enigmatic sculpture on the cover of your book, Nomad by Trey Hill? How do you see it in relation to your poems?
Axelrod: Trey is my neighbor and teaches ceramics and sculpture at the University of Montana. Large crates of his sculptures come and go from his driveway all the time—they’re heading out to galleries and collectors all over the world.
I was very taken by a series of his ceramic sculptures that seem based on a familiar organic form—the branching of heavy limbs from the boles of trees. The limbs though are lopped off, as if by a chainsaw, close to the trunk. Those particular pieces also struck me as erotic and brought to mind ancient Greek nudes, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” as it were.
But of course, they are neither trees nor bodies of gods, they are more abstract than representational, not to mention that their actual texture is smooth and soft as the skin over an infant’s wrist. And the sculptures also stream vertically with subtle lines in varying widths of muted black, grey, white, blue, etcetera. The branching, or if you will, the fractal-ing of limbs also replicates the form of a river’s watershed, and so, lopped off as these shapes were, the work struck me as ecological and profoundly critical. I intended to put one of these on the cover, and even took an informal poll that clearly favored those more sensual sculptures over the one I chose.
The provocation that is Nomad is no less ecological or critical. There’s an implicit narrative available in the piece and it made an intuitive claim based in that narrative that I thought resonated deeply with the poems. In the porcelain element of the sculpture, abstract as it is, there remains something vaguely mammalian and ghostly in the form. Is it a skull? Sure it is, but, not really. Hard to say. It undermines our perception of it. And then it’s crowned with these geometric shapes and otherwise randomized pick-up sticks all made from pieces of steel and welded. I recall thinking, “Truly, here’s our predicament.”
