I S S U E 8
Rob Mackenzie and Dan O’Brien: A Conversation
Rob A. Mackenzie and Dan O’Brien met in 2014 at the StAnza Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, where they shared the stage at a reading entitled ‘Border Crossing’ Since then they have kept in touch with each other and each other’s work. Mackenzie’s poetry collections, published by Salt, are The Opposite of Cabbage, Good News, and his latest, The Book of Revelation (2020). He is the reviews editor of Magma poetry magazine and runs the literary publisher Blue Diode Press. He lives in Edinburgh. O’Brien is a poet, playwright, librettist, and essayist whose poetry collections, published in the UK by CB Editions, are War Reporter, Scarsdale, and New Life. His most recent books are A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas (CB Editions in the UK; Dalkey Archive Press in the US) and Our Cancers: A Chronicle in Poems (Acre Books / University of Cincinnati Press), both published in 2021. He lives in Los Angeles. The following conversation was conducted via email in recent months.
Rob: A lot of poetry I've read about cancer has described appointments, treatment etc., almost like a narrative diary. But your book takes a more fragmented, at times almost surreal approach, as if what was happening couldn't be captured other than in a nightmarish vision. Is that how it felt to you? And, if so, was it a conscious decision to write in that way?
Dan: The poems in Our Cancers came to me quite naturally in their fragmentary form, beginning with my wife’s diagnosis with breast cancer in September 2015, and continuing through my diagnosis and treatment for colon cancer that ended in December of 2016. And while the poems have been revised a great deal—and many fragments, of course, never made it into the collection—I wanted to preserve their fragile nature and quality. I suppose I was trying to respect where they were coming from—the unconscious, or the world of the spirit, or maybe it’s all the same. Another reader has used the word ‘irreality’ rather than ‘surrealistic’ to describe these poems, and I probably prefer the former: my experience with this trauma, and the two other events I consider to be transformative traumas in my life (a brother’s suicide attempt that I witnessed when I was twelve, and being disowned by my family in my early thirties), is that it can render the day-to-day utterly strange for a while. You may perceive the world in new ways, so there are glimpses of clarity, but there’s also much confusion and therefore terror too. There are some nightmarish poems in this collection but trauma also opens one up to visions—of grief, of hope, of joy and love.
I’m curious to hear more about the nightmares and visions of your Book of Revelation. The poems are highly metaphorical and meaningfully illogical, evocative, and wonderfully strange, while at the same time they address ‘real world’ events and personages. As you noted, the poems in Our Cancers often seem to flee from prosaic details of trauma; your poems engage head-on with our traumatic times. How did you (or didn’t you) relate to the tradition of the prophetic while writing it?
Rob: I remember following a social media discussion on Revelation (the biblical book) in which someone claimed the writer, John of Patmos, was clearly mad. No sane person, he said, could claim to have had such grotesque divine visions. He was entirely certain of this but, as so often with research-free opinion, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Revelation is a prophetic book, and by that I don’t mean foretelling the future but identifying and interpreting the signs of the times. It’s in the tradition of other prophetic books from the Hebrew Bible like Ezekiel and the second half of Daniel, and probably other apocalyptic texts we no longer have, and much of John’s imagery is inspired directly from that literary tradition. The prophets howled, articulately, into moments of crisis. John’s work is a passionate literary endeavour, not a literal vision. The vision is simply a religious convention. He is almost certainly writing against the Roman Empire, the colonial power, but the wild, timeless imagery enables confrontation with any era of oppression. My collection was an attempt to engage with the biblical text and write poems into the present moment. The danger is that some poems may date as history shuffles on, but my hope is that most won’t. Time will tell.
I’m interested that you describe your poems as stemming from ‘the unconscious, or the world of the spirit, or maybe it’s all the same’. Is there anything in your own religious background that impacted on the poems, or in how you reacted to cancer, or would you view your experience, and poems, purely in secular terms?
Dan: I was raised without religion, at least not religion in any consistent, organized way. My father was a lapsed Catholic; my mother a Christmas-and-Easter Episcopalian. When we went to church, usually on Christmas and Easter, we went to an Episcopal church. I was baptized but never confirmed.
And yet, for reasons I’ve never entirely understood, the book that meant the most to me as a child was the Bible. I read it all the time. I believed it was true. I proselytized to my many siblings (much to their annoyance). My parents were strict and, frankly, mentally ill; their commandments were often incomprehensible, and their punishments for our transgressions were painful. So, despite an innate religious enthusiasm, I developed a strong skepticism toward any kind of authority and dogma. With adolescence, and a self-diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, not incidentally, I transitioned to a psychological belief system, followed soon after by a vaguely spiritual belief in the ineffable source of artistic creation. For many years, for example, I was fascinated by the so-called occult as a manifestation of suppressed psychic pain—the haunting of journalist Paul Watson in my poetry collections War Reporter and New Life (and my play The Body of an American) is a prime example of that fascination.
The truth is though: I have faith, even if I don’t understand or feel compelled (so far) to define my faith. Maybe I’m mystically inclined, or lazy. I don’t practice any particular religion. But what arrived from somewhere during cancer were often Biblical symbols and metaphors and language. This gave me comfort, courage, and paradoxically, perhaps, a sense of reality amidst all the unthinkable change. I wonder, Rob, if your response to Our Cancers has something to do with your vocation as a Church of Scotland minister. And I’m curious how you meld and separate your identities as a minister and as a poet. To what degree do you conceive of The Book of Revelation, and your poetic work in general, as a form of outreach and ministry?
Rob: My primary response to Our Cancers was, I imagine, probably the same as for most readers. I was struck both by the ‘irreality’ (good word) of what happened—and the very fact that it could happen—and by the impact of the poems, which never seemed to make any conventional attempt to manipulate emotion and yet are intensely affecting. It would be hard, and perhaps wrong, to separate my vocation from the rest of life—just as it’s wrong to separate deed from identity, sensibility from poetic craft. I distrust any tendency to compartmentalize the self. When I was younger, I used to say I did exactly that, but I now realise that was nonsense. I suppose we’re all like Russian dolls with many aspects, both obvious and deeply hidden, to our beings, personalities and beliefs, and it’s not possible to hold them apart from one another. They combine, in some usually incomprehensible way, to form our reactions to art. When people articulate those reactions, they are simply projections: what they want people to see publicly. I don’t think of my own poetry as a form of ministry or outreach at all, although my interest in religion and philosophy does inform my writing. The minute any form of ideology or theology begins to govern the progression of a poem, the more conscious the design it’s likely to have on its readers, and the less interesting it will be as a poem. I write intuitively and don’t think of readers at all when I’m in the process of writing, although I obviously want readers. In fact, I would like more of them. Such is the paradox of being a poet!
I’d like to ask you about form. In your first collection, War Reporter, you frequently used a medium-to-long line and each poem was a single block of text. In Our Cancers, the poems vary in length, but they are all written in very short-lined tercets, the line-breaks often cutting across the natural syntax. For example, from the beginning of poem number 50:
Spring and
the cricket
trillsinside
the house.
The babeponders
the window’s
talking pane . . .
What made you decide to write in this style? Also, some poets find a ‘voice’ and stick to it throughout their careers but do you aim for something different in every book?
Dan: Without meaning to, I seem to have found a different form for each of my collections. These books all express my voice, I assume, but perhaps their variability is a result of my simultaneous vocation as a playwright. I see my poetry collections as narratives, as in a play or novel, though not nearly as cohesive as work in those genres. War Reporter, as well as its continuation, New Life—two books about my friend, the journalist Paul Watson—were composed of poems written in single, often long stanzas of ten-syllable lines (though often the final lines of these poems were shorter). I simply followed my intuition here, though looking back I can imagine reasons for it. These are persona poems, for the most part. And the tumbling ‘block’ of text suggested to me the intensity and momentum of dramatic monologue. They are maximalist poems as well: I needed space, if you will, in which to encapsulate the astonishing breadth of Watson’s decades-long experience in war zones.
The form of the poems in Our Cancers was again intuitive. This is simply how these poems came to me at first, how they seemed to want to be written. I mentioned earlier my belief in the occult source of art. In the long run I overthink and revise obsessively, but I’m pretty passive when it comes to what and how I write. I can justify these minimalist tercets in Our Cancers now, years after their first draft, as an expression of a psychic state in which I felt blown apart, fragmented, almost speechless (though with an urgent desire to try to say something—to make something, any kind of meaning or sense—out of what my wife and I were going through).
The poems in your latest collection seem rather maximalist to me, Rob. Reading it I feel as if this persona, a modern-day every-person prophet, is trying to take in, comprehend, criticize, satirise, and perhaps even perversely enjoy the never-ending indignities and iniquities of our modern culture. The poem ‘Chapter 8’ is a favorite of mine, as it playfully yet pointedly riffs on the seemingly arbitrary fractions in the biblical Revelation (‘A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night.’). I’ve done some internet sleuthing and found an earlier version of your poem that concludes: ‘a third can think of no reason / to reimagine the world.’ (Glasgow Review of Books, 2018). As published in your collection the poem now reads: ‘a third can think of many reasons / to reimagine the world.’ How did this revision occur, and how does it relate to a poetic impulse to encompass and respond to the world of politics and culture?
Rob: The poet and editor, Helena Nelson, responded to one of the other poems, in draft form, by suggesting the ending should be framed as a positive rather than negative statement. This wasn’t because she thinks poems should all end in light rather than darkness but because she no doubt recognized my tendency to lapse into melancholy even at points where there’s no reason to do so! I realised this spoke to the ending of my Chapter 8 too. I suppose my revision, ‘a third can think of many reasons / to reimagine the world’, could be read in a negative sense, as it suggests that two thirds of people aren’t interested! I still think the positive statement is more hopeful than the negative—such are the tricks language can play—but more than that, I believe resistance isn’t futile and requires a positive formulation. I feel these figures are also true in quite a literal sense. I admit I’ve no solid figures to back this up, but I suspect roughly one third of people do reimagine the world and try to make things better, one third are entirely apathetic, and one third actively support and defend the most inequitable elements of the status quo. Unfortunately, most of the power, money and influence is held by a small percentage of those within that latter third, which can make matters appear more hopeless than they are.
Most people in the UK and USA don’t read poems, especially contemporary poems, and I doubt poetry can change these societies, but it can have a profound effect on people who do read it. That’s not to be sniffed at. It’s like a minority sport, which gives enormous pleasure and vitality to its enthusiasts. Or perhaps just as some weird, atonal, experimental Norwegian noise band is never going to have the audience or power of Ed Sheeran or Kanye West, the poetry of e.g. Zbigniew Herbert can’t compete for mainstream appeal with bestsellers like Agatha Christie or James Patterson. I’d still take the Norwegians and Herbert any day. Now and again, a poem cuts through to mainstream culture, reaches loads of people, and is a reminder of why its existence is important. What poetry does can’t be measured. Whether a poem speaks to one person or millions isn’t the main question. If it encourages a person (or millions of people) to reimagine the world or reframe their life outwith the dominant narratives and accompanying subtle propaganda, it’s doing what good poetry does, and it can have both personal and political implications. I mean, your book connects personal, potentially devastating experiences of cancer with the September 11th Twin Towers attacks. Any mention of 9/11 in a poem gives rise immediately to strong opinions and feelings, or perhaps even alarm bells, and I guess this connection was one you had to deal with very carefully?
Dan: I’ll of course never know what caused our cancers. But I’ll always be suspicious. We lived a short walk from the World Trade Center, and we fled the attacks that warm September morning with our windows left open. When we returned many days (was it weeks?) later, the toxic dust coated every surface, infused curtains and upholstery. Not to mention the smoke from the Ground Zero site that went on smoldering for months. Several doctors have told us that an ‘environmental insult’ can take 10-15 years to develop into cancer, which fits our timeline. I don’t have any known genetic markers for colon cancer, no family history of it, I lived a healthy lifestyle, I was barely 42 . . . But like I said I’ll never have any certainty; cancer can have a multiplicity of causes, often acting in concert, including that of random mutation.
The poems that allude to that dark day belong in the collection, I believe, for many reasons. The first poem depicts the morning my wife discovered the lump in her breast. The second poem flashes back, if you will, to a memory of September 11th because this was an earlier catastrophe in our lives together, but also because this was a public catastrophe as opposed to a private one, and I’ve always been troubled and fascinated by the contrast. War and pandemics, for example, are infinitely worse in terms of the sheer number of people whose lives are upended and lost, while a private catastrophe like my cancer, or the abuse in my childhood, is lonely and isolating by comparison. Of course, war and pandemic are composed of countless private tragedies, and cancer is a public catastrophe too: a little more than a third of the population (here we go again with those biblical thirds!) will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime. Add to that all the people whose loved ones and friends will be diagnosed with cancer, and you’re dealing with an experience that’s essentially universal. This is another reason why I call the collection Our Cancers. Yes, it’s about my wife’s cancer, followed seamlessly by mine, but it’s also about the people I’ve known that have died of cancer, and those that have survived it. And I hope it’s about the struggle to survive any existential hardship—not merely to survive but to find meaning and even flashes of joy in the struggle.
Some of the compensatory joy in these poems has to do with the natural world. A friend recently read the book and characterized it as ‘crypto ecopoetry,’ which I like. I chose the image on the cover, a painting called Moon Over Magenta (2007) by Charles Emery Ross, because it evokes a bucolic landscape on fire. Our bodies are nature, and it’s hard to believe that what we’ve done to the natural world isn’t setting our bodies alight too. And yet, to circle back to what you wrote about ending ‘Chapter Eight’ on a positive note, I chose this image for the book’s cover because I felt that it suggests hope as well. It looks like a wildfire, yes, and maybe the red of the trees evokes carnage, an emergency at least; but perhaps it’s just a painting of fiery autumn foliage. There’s a violet shade in the trees too, a respite in the conflagration, and a calm in the sky above the tree line, the reassuring presence of the moon. This moon hasn’t turned blood red just yet. I didn’t want to shy away from the horror of illness in this collection, but I wanted and needed hope, too. I suppose I side with the third of people who believe that humanity has the potential to survive and to transcend apocalypse.
Your Book of Revelation contains so many vivid images of environmental degradation: ‘in days of hunger / of plastic straws floating on oceans’ (from ‘The Line,’ your collection’s powerful closing poem). But I’m curious about a different kind of environment: social media. Clearly many of these poems respond to the language and postures of Twitter, etc. I’m curious to hear more about how you think social media effects the community, culture, and craft of poets. And does the form of social media, such as it is, influence the form of your poems in this collection?
Rob: I can see why writers use, and like, social media. It's an arena for discovering poems and poets, for thinking through issues, for building mutually supportive communities and, of course, for staying in the public eye. But I think its influence is generally negative, even malign. I’m certain we’d all be much happier if it didn’t exist, although clearly that is no longer an option.
Twitter (substitute Facebook or any other social media group) exists not to serve its users but to feed itself. Its currency is polarization, which I think contributes effectively to the right-wing agenda to destabilize societies. Even though Twitter isn’t itself right-wing, it gives the right-wing exactly what they want. Its algorithms deliberately maximise potential for conflict because conflict creates clicks, which means money for Twitter and a lot of anger for everyone else. Self-righteous mobs tend to have little regard for either the feelings of their victims or for the truth. People too often believe simply what they want to be true and ignore or give little weight to evidence contradicting or even conclusively refuting their opinions. Positive discussions do happen, where people listen to each other and shift toward greater understanding, but too often debates are dominated by lies, distortion, knee-jerk reaction and unsubstantiated opinion—a desire to ‘win’ at all costs rather than consider questions asked by established facts.
I also think the mutually supportive communities that poets build for themselves on social media can quickly (and perhaps unconsciously) become places of exclusion. Genuine admiration for a poet’s work becomes less important than whether the poet retweets your posts enough! If they don’t, they’ll be muted or unfollowed. And this can create pressure on critical culture too. If a review is even mildly critical of a poet’s collection, you’ll sometimes find a social media mob thread attacking the reviewer—not engaging with what the reviewer has written, just saying what a terrible person they must be. And then we wonder why many people don’t want to get into reviewing poetry or why so many reviews read like back-slapping blurbs.
It’s difficult not to be on social media, unless you are already that increasingly rare beast, a famous poet who doesn’t need to publicise their work. Poets who eschew social media may find their collections go unnoticed and unread, even those whose work is far superior to a Twitter Flavour of the Month with thousands of followers.
My work in The Book of Revelation does respond to these tendencies in various ways. I don’t think the form of social media had much influence on the form of the poems other than, perhaps, poetry kicking back at the simplicities and fakery that social media encourages. That book was very deliberately a book of epochal protest. In my work since then, I’ve generally got back to writing poems that are less engaged with their specific moment and more about what lasts in the mystical darkness, and what happens to comedy, clocks, and the echo of barking dogs.