Green Linden Press

Interview with Dennis Hinrichsen on [q / lear] — January 22, 2020

Dennis Hinrichsen is the winner of Grid Poetry Prize for 2020 for his collection This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go which will appear later in the fall. His most recent work is is [q / lear], a chapbook from Green Linden Press, and Skin Music, winner of the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. His previous books include Rip-tooth (2010 Tampa Poetry Prize), Kurosawa’s Dog (2008 FIELD Poetry Prize), and Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights (1999 Akron Poetry Prize). His other awards include the 2015 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Prize from Map Literary for Electrocution, A Partial History as well as the 2016 Third Coast Poetry Prize and a 2014 Best of the Net Award. New work of his can be found in two anthologies from Michigan State University Press, Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice, and RESPECT: An Anthology of Poems on Detroit Music. From May 2017—April 2019, he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing [MI] area. 

Connor Yeck: Reading [q/lear] I found myself coming back to your many gestures toward the visual. We find titles such as "[Alzheimer's] [Raw Footage] [Early Afternoon]," as well as poems that seem powered by their own internal cinematography—the speaker's eye that "tilted // zoomed," or a cue such as "[MONTAGE].” How did you come to weave poetry and these visual styles together so closely, and what do you feel they allow you to do? What do you make of Robert Fanning calling you a "filmmaker" in terms of the poems here? 

Dennis Hinrichsen: This is a great question—the short answer is that I’m a visual learner—I need maps to pin down abstract relationships, how ideas interact. So I was always drawn to the visual in my reading. Dylan’s “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” from “Visions of Johanna” is perhaps the ur-root note. Hopkin’s “ooze of oil / crushed” is another. Donne’s “like gold to airy thinness beat” as well. Later, Issa’s “Deer licking / first frost / from each other's coats” [trans. Robert Hass] joined the group for its zoom moment.
I was a math major initially but was spending far too much time watching films—French New Wave, American Noir—and letting all that visual poetry wash over me. So I switched majors and carried into those first traditional English classes Truffaut and Buñuel and Dali, way too much Bergman, “Meshes of the Afternoon” et alia. So when I started reading text, I was always drawn to work that attracted the eye. I loved the way certain poems addressed the page, how they used white space, what they suggested formally. I didn’t have any language for that at the time, I was not given any language, but it started there.
And then it evolved from there. I didn’t want to write traditional formal poems—I wanted to understand the formal choices I was making writing free verse. Charles Wright’s work was central here, and at some point I just realized I was never not a formalist and that film (and music) were source code.
That haiku zoom moment was the start—that was a camera move to me—and so I spent a lot of time playing with triplets and that level of precision but sequenced in much longer narrative arcs. And then I threw in some indents and some enjambment, and suddenly the poems started to look interesting to me on the page. They seemed to breathe.
Flash forward: I started writing poems about films—Kurosawa, Antonioni, Bresson, Tarkovsky. Initially, for their imagery, but then later for their syntax. Their signature moves. And then I just decided I was a filmmaker. I was not just the writer, but I was the director, I scouted scenes, selected the cast, I ran sound, I catered, I did the special effects, etc.
I was also the cinematographer—I was the one blocking scenes and sequencing moves through time and space within the poem. I also was handling graphic design for the whole page. How to use to the whole page, in fact. Carol Frost’s I Will Say Beauty, published in 2003, is root note here. Every poem in her book is right-justified. I was intrigued by what that did to my sense of the line and my sense of a poem’s horizontal and vertical energies. So I played around with that for a while and finally included a right-justified poem in a book.
With [q / lear] and the poems I’m writing now, I just fully embraced the idea that my poems were not only cinematic in how they unfolded, but also a kind of graphic design as they addressed the 6x9 inch frame. And then I began to bring all that to the page, made it part of the page by calling out the cuts here and there, or announcing montage, or tableau, and so on. Allowing the stage manager to speak. And then right- and left-justification to create stanza breaks and visual contrasts—to mimic camera moves or cuts—this happened first in the “soul photograph” poems where the soul speaks back to the decaying body from the other side of the page. And then throughout the [q / lear] sequence to capture action or zoom moments, to reveal where the splices are. It reads to me like a multimedia play with on-stage action, with film in the background, with a sequence of stills in some cases.
What this allowed me to do was play with narrative and not get trapped in linearity. I could collapse time and be quicker in establishing atmosphere without losing the visual impact of the imagery or the narrative thread. It was an invitation to the imagination, a reminder that the poem is a made thing rather than a recording of an experience.
And then thinking this way suggested all sorts of formal possibilities that can be seen in the two poems you mentioned. For example, the Alzheimer’s poem was conceived as bits and pieces of, as the title indicates, raw footage, nothing else, I just shot film. That’s the poem. And then I stole/borrowed/riffed off Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker for the first two sections. There’s a wonderful slow glide over objects under water in his film which gave me the idea for the first part of the poem. That is, a series of unfinished “if” statements. The second part of the poem wants to mirror his signature move—the long take—where the camera crashes through our sense of cinematic time—where’s the cut?—and explodes despite the stasis into something that feels eternal. Thus, her stare.
The third part is just three quick cuts to bring the poem to a close. And then the soundtrack idea: I started early drafts in first person POV where I basically duplicated the camera, then it occurred to me that I could use persona and mic that interior dialogue against the exterior gaze of the camera. I thought that gave the poem a more interesting dynamic and resonance.
The other poem you mentioned came from seeing a YouTube video on how David Fincher works. I had heard he was a difficult director but was unclear as to why. It turned out it was an issue of the actor and cameraman having to work in an intricate dance through a scene where the character’s subtle movements—looking up, looking down, etc.—are mirrored by the camera. His films often seem simultaneously cold and spare to me in a way, but always locked in. So anyway, I thought: there’s a poem. Now, what’s the scene, who’s in it, what’s the action? And then I shot it with the speaker as camera watching and mirroring his father shaving. That seemed perfect. Got the Foley guy in to bring it to a close and end slate the scene. 
So Robert Fanning, a fine poet, was right. I’ve been thinking along these lines for a few years now. 

Yeck: You once mentioned "poems as graphic design" when thinking about the choices we make in placing our work on the page. Each poem in [q/lear] seems to exist in a wholly unique form, making use of all possible space. How do you approach form and "mapping" your poems? I suppose this could also be a question of process: where do you find yourself beginning a poem?  

Hinrichsen: My process has changed over the years. Where before I chased form thinking I had content in hand, more and more lately I think of formal moves or shapes and seek content. How to riff off Sergei Parajanov and his use of tableau in The Colour of Pomegranates and The Legend of the Suram Fortress, for example. He uses a static camera position, where the image is a painting coming vibrantly alive. I scaled down and used this technique in [q / lear] where Q is looking through a window, or lens, at the backyard and her children without sound. A piece of silent film more or less cut into the sequence. I’d already decided that I wanted to use a lot of film and theater tropes so using montage, calling something second unit work, or thinking of the “sightings” sections as between-the scenes out-takes was not that much of a stretch. And then vignettes that de-emphasized the dramatic more or less. 
I’ve already mentioned Tarkovsky and Fincher as starting points that resulted in a different kind of mapping for the momento mori backbeats. Other starting points included the pseudo-science of taking soul photographs. This gave me a shape for riffing off the Sally Mann body farm photographs. I also isolated the voice in an aria or two and used the idea of schematics where the logos just follows the process of the body breaking down. 
Once I give myself permission to follow these ideas, a world of shapes opened up and was a source of constant surprise. A variation on John Cage’s idea of giving oneself directions and then following them.
We’ve focused on film here, but music theory plays a significant role in this as well. I had the good fortune of teaching a song writing class many years ago (basically, a class in formal poetry) that broke down key concepts into non-academic terms. It was eye-opening, ear-opening. The idea that I could write in a particular key was interesting to think about. And then if I knew the key, my I chord, what were my IV and V chords? And then odds and evens, first and last, power positions, all of this in service to writing songs that were rhetorical killer. And then—since it all connects—it echoed back through ideas I had heard in Charles Wright, and in my study of Shakespeare, and Hass’ (to me) seminal essay in Twentieth Century Pleasures, “Listening and Making.” So song form crashed into sonnet form, crashed into three-chord rock and roll, crashed into the idea that not only was I making films, but I was a percussionist on multiple levels, as well as using the whole page to create a beautiful (to the eye) musical score. 

Yeck: One of the things a first-time reader might notice in your work is your use of the double slash, "//," or what Bill Olsen once called the double virgule. How do you see these slashes functioning, typographically and musically? What are they allowing you to do in terms of rhythm? Do you see them in any way connected to your eye for film?  

Hinrichsen: I abandoned traditional punctuation some time ago because I wanted to sound different and break well-established habits of syntax and thought. I wanted to be quicker and create more angles in the work, again without losing the music or the narrative line of the poem. I always loved that in the work of W.S. Merwin but never really felt competent enough to abandon punctuation altogether, so using double virgules seemed like the answer. To my mind, they function as cinematic cuts, or places where I pause in my reading of the poem, so they function as musical notation here, as well as places where I would use commas. So yes, the use of the double virgule was very much connected to my eye for film. How you could build a scene or an atmosphere quickly without all the extra work of the sentence. All without losing the lyric rush of the poem. 

Yeck: The poems in [q / lear] traverse a wide region of subjects, both narratively and temporally. We find familial history, memory, the body, the mind, health, decay, but we are always brought back to the character of Q, to mother and to motherhood. What made you consider King Lear a frame or lodestone for these poems? What did you see in Lear as a character, or narrative, that would allow you to create this particular world of work? 

Hinrichsen: The [q / lear] sequence began initially as a joke and was one vignette in length. It was simply a response I had to seeing a promotional spot for the Amazon Prime version of King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins. Normally, I would be interested in this. I read Lear many years ago and fell in love with the play. I taught Shakespeare off and on when I was still teaching and went through all the available movie versions. But for some reason I was appalled—yet another aging male actor having a magnificent vehicle to grow into and star in. I imagined Kenneth Branagh in the wings—he’s ready to go after working through much of Henning Mankell’s Wallander books—and then countless other young British actors with fingers crossed. And then I thought of Judi Dench dying in the arms of James Bond, Helen Mirren doing cameo work among all the wreckage in Hobbs and Shaw, so naturally (here comes the joke part) I thought of my mother—a film nut and aspiring actress herself in her own mind—to complete this trio, and so I wrote that first vignette that foregrounded her as queen (as queen for a day, perhaps, queen, at least, for that moment). The rest spilled out over a very short period of time, with the five act of Lear as found form.
So the poem is essentially stitched together pieces of film where the ordinary behaviors of a 60’s era housewife and mother are raised to the level of the heroic by their placement center stage/page and the attention given her. All without the tragedy of Lear in the main.
There are only two moments—the dragon moment in act three and in the close where the character is not carried off—where I paid any attention to the play. And then I let Lear, the father, have some moments so his character was not so one-dimensional as source for the harm in the poems.
And then yes, body and mind, were root notes. Hers, mine, hers birthing mine, ideas of forgetting against acts of memory, the reality that, living, we already housethose bacteria that will aid in that next transformation. So lost text, imagined text, new text but with blowflies.