Interview with William Fargason on Love Song to the Demon-possessed Pigs of Gadara — July 20, 2020
William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, April 2020), and the winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He received two awards from the Academy of American Poets, a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018–2019 Kingsbury Fellowship. He earned a BA in English from Auburn University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida. williamfargason.com
Youssef Helmi: Before starting, I want to say thank you for taking the time to (metaphorically, at least) sit with me and talk through some poetry and your book, Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara. First, I want to ask about the collection’s title. It is both imposing and surprisingly tender—a “love song” for these demon-possessed pigs. In your 2018 interview with Leah Nielson, in Botticelli Magazine, Ms. Nielson mentions that the name of your manuscript was Ash on the Tongue, which is also the name of one of the poems in Love Song. Can you talk about this title change? Did it mark a shift for you in the manuscript’s development or in how you thought of and approached it?
William Fargason: My first book went through five title changes: Clean Theory, Fig Leaf, Aubade with Barbed Wire, Ash on the Tongue, Egg Tooth, and finally, Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara. Each was a “re-envisioning” of the book and my attempt to unite the poems, often poems on different themes, under one title. It’s sort of like picking a restaurant for ten of your friends. Not everyone will be happy with any choice, so you make the best one. I am very happy with the final title of the book, and it came after I took a manuscript workshop at Florida State, when my then-manuscript went from 87 pages to 68 pages. I learned the power in omission, in cutting poems out. As I work on my second manuscript now, I’m learning that shorter is sometimes better. No one wants to read the same poem four times in a book, so say it once, and say it well.
Helmi: What about the title poem, or even the title’s words themselves, made you feel as though it is better suited to be the title and thus the reader’s first interaction with the collection?
Fargason: I think the title is jarring, slightly off-putting, but then again, how I approach themes of masculinity and faith is often just as jarring in the book. It’s a book that has tenderness (love song) and pain (demon-possessed). The pigs themselves only make one appearance in the book (spoiler!), but they stand in for how the speaker views himself in relation to his God and his family—his Father/father. I like that the word “love” comes first in the title, as the book is about the complicated forms of love. I used to hate giving introductions for my work when I read in public, and so I would just state “this next poem is a love poem” for every poem I read. And I think that introduction holds up for most of the poems in this book. These are love poems.
Helmi: Looking at the different themes and styles threaded throughout this collection, “this next poem is a love poem” truly feels like the most accurate and genuine way to describe the progression from one poem to the next. I now want to shift to examining the poems themselves. In one of my undergrad workshops, my professor often said that repetition and patterns, in a sense, form the backbone of poetry—readers are always looking for a pattern or repetition. Throughout Love Song, there are poems that employ repetition to a potent and imposing degree such as “When My Father Calls Me a Pussy,” “Upon Receiving My Inheritance,” “Aquarium,” and especially “Cain.” In “Cain,” the lack of punctuation and the repetition of Cain, brother, Abel, and Lord gives the poem the tumbling energy of someone stooped in fervent prayer. Can you speak to the power of this insistent repetition found in “Cain” and other poems? Can you, if only briefly, walk me through constructing these poems’ repetition, how you avoided mundanity while still making it a propelling force in the poem(s)?
Fargason: I love repetition and anaphora in poetry—in poems I read and in poems I write. Often these sorts of repetitions allow me to let anything I want enter the poem, they give me the freedom and the excuse to do that. That anaphora is the tether to reality while I write the poem, and my unconscious mind—the mind in prayer—just sort of lets loose on the page. Most of these anaphora poems in the book have very little editing done to them, at least in terms of reorganization. When writing anaphora poems like “Cain” or “Not an Entrance” or “There Is No Power in Blame,” what you see is mostly a first shot, an outpouring of sorts. Anaphora lets me stay electric in the poem, to make connections as fast as my mind can write them down. I wish I had more to say about my technique to them. I will say that I’ve been using anaphora for about eight years, and practice helps. Sometimes I know a phrase will be the next anaphora poem, like the phrase “not an entrance” became in that poem. There is a need I have to meditate on it, to explore it sonically, linguistically, and intellectually on the page. Those repeated phrases that become the anaphoras are usually phrases that stick with me, and I have no choice but to write the poem.
Helmi: I want to return to “Cain,” a poem that—from the first time I read Love Song—left an impression on me that has yet to fade. The poem ends with “Cain / there is no escape from the self my brother[.]” The immediate next poem is “Emo, 2005,” a poem I found very much about, if not escape, then a respite from the self. The tension produced by these two poems existing side by side is fascinating. What do you think of these created tensions, not only here but elsewhere in Love Song? When putting together the manuscript, was this sort of orchestration a consideration for you?
Fargason: I think a lot of this book deals with wanting to escape a self riddled with imposed masculinity, inherited diseases, mental illness, etc. There is a suicidal drive through much of the book, that ultimate and terrible escape. I find it hard to separate my writing about depression and my writing about suicidal ideation, as they often happen simultaneously for me. And many of the poems in the book trace those thoughts out. I like the fact that a poem about something as ancient as the Cain and Abel story is right next to something so contemporary like emo culture of the early 2000s. And honestly, both texts—the Bible and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge—had profound effects on me, both offering me places and ways to escape the self. The Bible gave me the option to escape a self through surrender to God, and Three Cheers gave me the option to escape through shared and communal pain and the art that accompanies it. One of the saddest realizations of the whole book is that the speaker is never given that escape, at least not for long. He must go on living, with escape only reserved for brief moments of spirituality or art or sex. And when you can’t escape from the self, you’re left with a mirror. That’s where a lot of these poems come from. When organizing this book, I always tried to think about how the end of one poem played off the next. Poems next to each other in a book should operate like acrobats, the one swinging from his feet should use his hands to grab the legs of the next, trapezing through the book.
Helmi: From both knowing you personally and from some of the poems in Love Song, like “Emo, 2005” and “Images of Kurt Cobain’s Shotgun Released,” I gather music is important to you. What role, if any, did music play in the process of working on your manuscript? Were there particular sounds or bands preoccupying you that you then found bubbling up in poems?
Fargason: Nirvana was (and is) a very important band to me, which is where that elegy came from. I think my entrance into poetry was, like a lot of people’s, through song lyrics. I used to write song lyrics in middle school before ever being able to play an instrument. Bands that treat their lyrics like poetry are ones that have influenced my own writing: Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst, the Mountain Goats, Elliot Smith, etc. I am also drawn to bands that don’t shy away from making something sound beautiful from their pain. I’m thinking of Elliott Smith here. Some people might make sweeping genre generalizations and call this type of music “emo,” which is not always right. What these bands and singers taught me is to be vulnerable in my writing—that there can be something beautiful that comes from leaning into the pain in a song or in a poem. Those sorts of bands gave me the permission I needed to not shy away from what is painful. The only way out is through the wound.
Helmi: Do you have any recommendations for fellow poets to give a spin?
Fargason: Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Waxahatchee, Phoebe Bridgers, Car Seat Headrest, and La Dispute. I’m excited about the new Bright Eyes album coming out soon. And a long-time writing favorite is the band Circa Survive. I have written and revised so many poems to their music.
Helmi: Throughout Love Song are longer poems written in a single stanza, some without conventional or any punctuation. I, personally, write longer poems more often than not, so these really caught my eye. There is something tricky and fun about juggling all the pieces that come together in longer poems, but at the same time, I’m always weary of the risk of dragging the poem out. I’m going to specifically ask about “There Is No Power in Blame,” but please feel free to discuss any of the other longer poems: Can you walk me through an abridged version of your process of putting together a longer poem—coming up with the different images and rhetorical movements, bringing the different threads together over the poem’s course, recognizing places where you might’ve overstayed your welcome?
Fargason: “There Is No Power in Blame” is the longest poem in the book and one of the longest I’ve ever written. That poem had no real outlining or organization done in advance. I sat down and wrote it start to finish in one sitting. After, I sharpened some of the images, deleted phrases here and there to speed up the music. I may have added a line here or there. But I think most rhetorical moves in a poem have to come organically in the first draft for them to feel natural to a reader. To add a big pontification in the middle of the poem in the fifth draft would often feel burdensome.
With that being said, some of the poems, like “Fig Leaf,” went through 25 drafts before the version you read in the book. I do revise all my poems, most over ten drafts until I get it right. But I think with poems that follow a lyric stream-of-consciousness mode, there isn’t much you can do as a writer to interrupt it when writing it. You just have to turn on the faucet and let the water out, catching as much of it as you can.
My tendency to do single-stanza poems comes from my love of Sharon Olds’s poems, how her poems are often one unit of thought traced out to its end. She taught me that using a comma splice in a poem to speed up the thought is often the best move, even if not grammatically correct. But sometimes, I forgo all punctuation and let the phrases connect as they will in the reader’s head. The poet that taught me how to write well with no punctuation is Ellen Bryant Voigt, specifically her book Headwaters. These poems with no “form” often have to have just as much (if not more) attention to form in their creation. It’s an illusion that there is nothing there to hold the poem’s shape, but really the poet is always there. In every poem, the poet is always there.
Helmi: From its very first poem, Love Song concerns itself with masculinity, American masculinity, Southern masculinity, and here masculinity is seen as a constricting and damaging cage. Poems like “Carving,” “My Father’s College Roommate,” and even “Notes on Bridge Burning” to a degree, consider masculinity through both the speaker and “characters,” like the father or grandfather. The attitudes towards masculinity, like these poems, are nuanced, complex, and constantly in motion. Can you speak to the differences in attitude towards masculinity in a poem like “Notes on Bridge Burning,” where the speaker inhabits the masculine shell of “Never take back anything. Never give anything away,” and a poem like “When My Father Calls Me a Pussy,” which harbors a more clear contempt and rejection? My thesis director, Erin Belieu, would frequently say, “The poet always returns to the scene of the crime.” Were your returns to the scene in Love Song purposeful, as in telling yourself “I will write about [x],” or did this contemplation on masculinity just keep finding its way in unexpectedly?
Fargason: I grew up in Alabama, and the traditional forms of masculinity in the South are so incredibly toxic. I don’t think I ever meant to write a poem interrogating toxic masculinity; it just sort of happened. I had to write these poems, but I don’t think that means any of these poems had a purpose before formation. I don’t have a goal with starting a poem other than to finish it. It’s only after the poem is done that it can take on some sort of larger message. To start with the message is to tell the poem what it needs to be. You don’t get to tell the poem what it will be; it tells you. It was only after I wrote some of these poems that I was able to step back and say, “Wow, a lot of these were about toxic masculinity,” which helped in organizing them or realizing they formed a book.
The speaker in “Notes on Bridge Burning” lashes out in his pain, which reveals the aftereffects of exposing the self to pain or loss. That poem is retaliation from the pain linked to vulnerability. It’s almost meant as a character sketch—a hurt person who only knows how to deal with that hurt by unleashing more hurt (like the father in the book). I’ve heard that anger is always a secondary emotion, that it’s always covering up some other emotion. “Notes on Bridge Burning” reveals that behind the speaker’s anger is very intense pain.
I hope this book argues very clearly against toxic forms of masculinity, and how they damage boys growing up. To me, expressing vulnerability in many of these poems is one of the most powerful things I can do to combat toxic masculinity, which would have me repress any other emotion but anger. I hope anyone reading the book realizes that the way to break away from being raised with backwards and toxic ideas of masculinity is to be honest with their feelings, seek out therapy if they need it, and to know that anger is such a narrow slice of the spectrum of human emotion. Honestly, fathers (and the mothers who go along with it) can do better.
Helmi: On a similar note to my previous questions: In Love Song, both you the poet and the speaker are very aware, and almost obsessed, with the ideas of lineage, particularly the line of father to son to son. In some poems, like “Watching My Father Pray Over the Lord’s Supper,” “Elegy with Digital Flowers,” or “There Is No Power in Blame,” the speaker feels trapped and isolated by the burden of male lineage. In others, “When My Father Tells Me My Great-Grandfather Was in the KKK” and “Anchor,” there is a rebellion against that legacy, against that sense of entrapment with lines like “I will / be ready when he returns I will let us leave I will take us home” or “I must be / different I can’t let what I was taught be what I teach.” Was this a topic you knew you wanted to explore in different ways, or did it just keep coming back in these varying shapes?
Fargason: In Love Song I explore my patrilineage more than my matrilineage, mainly because the trauma and mental illness in my family comes from that side. There is no escape from one’s bloodline, or the family that came before me, so I think that’s why I kept returning to that theme in the book. This return wasn’t purposeful, but rather, something I needed to work out on the page. Part of being different than the generations before me involves me addressing the past generation’s wrongdoings and my place within them. I contain all those generations of people within me, and I have to unburden myself of that at some point. I have to get it out on the page. That’s not an easy process—to confront years I never lived and people I never met and to make poems out of what I inherit. This interrogation of my lineage is explored even more in-depth in my second book, which I’m currently working on.
Helmi: I really think you touched on something haunting yet vitally important to poetry: Confronting a history and what it manifests in the present. Writing poetry, to me, is an act of creation that by its nature broaches the topic of lineage. I feel the poet is always in conversation with and returning to the history of language, tradition, and poetic craft that came before her/ him/them. For you, what do these conversations look like in your process? Are there any particular people or movements in the “lineage of poetry” you found yourself drawn to while writing Love Song? How do you see these conversations in poetry shifting as there is greater participation in and attention paid to discourse concerning the historical and contemporary use of English to perpetuate racist, homophobic, colonialist, xenophobic, etc. rhetoric?
Fargason: I’ve always said that I think my poetry grandparents are Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop. Other early and mid-century poets I also am heavily influenced by are Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams, and Sylvia Plath. More contemporary poets like Sharon Olds, Frank Bidart, Ada Limón, Shane McCrae, and Richard Siken have all changed how I write. It’s like T.S. Eliot said, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” If you read those writers, then read my book, you can hear their influence echoing off the walls.
The poetry landscape is more inclusive of marginalized voices that were always writing but often overlooked. I am working to be a part of this change currently happening, both in my own poetry and in my role as an editor and teacher. As an editor, I want to help elevate historically silenced voices. As a teacher, I see deficiencies in the canon. The canon is racist, sexist, homophobic, and ultimately, exclusionary. I can’t just teach “The Canon.” That’s irresponsible, and it’s my job to include a diverse group of voices in my classroom. As a writer, I have to be aware that my voice, my writing, can either be used to uphold or tear down racist, homophobic, or xenophobic traditions. This means that as a white writer, I am not exempt from writing about race, but it’s important I root it in my own lived experience instead of appropriating. That’s where the poem “When My Father Tells Me My Great-Grandfather was in the KKK” came from. As a writer from Alabama, if I overlook writing about race, I’m being irresponsible. My second book explores race and the South more in depth and hopefully continues the conversation that poem started. I live in a country where BIPOC are being murdered on the street in broad daylight. I can’t just stand by and say nothing. One of the ways people can start a change is by reading, teaching, and publishing BIPOC writers. Any person who doesn’t want to do that, or who pushes back against that, is upholding those terrible traditions I am committed to dismantling.
Helmi: Departing from our conversation on lineage, I want to look towards the future. America is a country (or colonialist project, some might say) that has prided itself on a notion of “progress” on the institutional level that is more self-congratulatory than about achieving real and palpable results. However, with mass protests occurring nationwide against the longstanding perpetuation of state-endorsed violence against Black communities, I want to believe something is changing. I hope this movement doesn’t stop here-and-now, but that it continues surging forward to address the many other racist, classist, and oppressive structures in the American societal and governmental apparatus. And within this larger push, I need to believe there is a place for poetry and poets, as individuals, to do real good for both our generation and future generations. As a teacher and poet, what actions do you think young poets, like myself, can take to amplify the voices that need to be heard, to actively be anti-racist, to educate and effect change in ourselves and our communities?
Fargason: Young writers should read as much as possible and write as much as possible. That’s the only way to get better. But they shouldn’t just read poets who have similar lived experiences as them—that would create an echo chamber as they work to develop their own voices. Rather, young writers should read as widely and deeply as possible, making sure to read books by BIPOC writers, queer writers, trans writers, women writers, and disabled writers. Read their work (so much great work is available for free online), recommend their books to friends, family, and classmates, and if you have the means to, buy their books. Doing so will expand young writers’ definition of poetry and inform their own writing. Young writers must be committed to being anti-racist—in what they read, in what they write, in what they publish, and in what they teach or pass on. Diversity is the strength of the writing community. Members of the writing community must hold each other accountable for being actively anti-racist. There is no space for hate in the writing community.
The writing process often involves discomfort. Young writers must be willing to push themselves to write about uncomfortable topics if they want to grow. Activism must find its way onto the page—in the topics written about, in the tone used, and in the care for diverse narratives. White writers should not avoid writing about race because it makes them uncomfortable or assume that the work of writing about race falls completely on BIPOC. That’s a weak excuse. If you are white, you have benefited from white privilege, and poetry can be used to interrogate that position, for example. Poetry is one way to start change, but it isn’t the only place. Police are murdering Black people in 2020, and have been well before we were able to document it on cellphones. To think that poetry could change legislation and end centuries of violence against Black people would be naïve, but poetry is still a necessary and important part of promoting justice and facilitating change.
Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; poetry is always inherently political. And white writers who think they can get away from engaging in politics in their poetry just show their own white privilege. Poetry can also be used to combat ignorance. In reading diverse narratives, a writer’s worldview is expanded and narrow-mindedness can hopefully be extinguished. That being said, all poets must do more than read and write. They must vote, protest, sign petitions, and donate. Young poets will often have to unlearn a history of America that is white-washed and wrongly taught to them in school. Seeking out work by diverse authors, as mentioned above, is part of this learning/unlearning process.
Poetry can explore difference and promote justice; it is a step towards changes that are needed in the poetry world and in the world at large. Institutions of white supremacy, like the police, must be defunded, disbanded, and ultimately, dismantled. I believe we can do that. We have to.
