Rivendell
a portion of Back There: A Conversation with David Budbill
David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in l940. He moved to rural Vermont in 1969 and has lived there with his wife and children ever since.
Budbill is the author of five books of poems, eight plays, a novel, a collection of short stories, a picture book for children and dozens of essays, introductions, speeches, book reviews and the libretto for an opera. He has been an occasional commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." In September of 1999 Copper Canyon Press published his latest book of poems: Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse. Garrison Keillor has read frequently from Moment to Moment on his National Public Radio program "The Writer's Almanac." In 1999, Chelsea Green Publishing Co. published a revised, expanded and updated version of his collected poems, Judevine, first published in 1989. Budbill received a National Endowment for the Arts Play Writing Fellowship in 1991, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award for Fiction in 1978.
David and I met during the 26th session of the New England Literature Program. The program was at the time located on the southern tip of Lake Winnepesaukee at Camp Kabeyun in New Hampshire. It was early summer, 2001, and both Budbill and I were visitors to the program.
SM: So many of the Moment to Moment poems are of you out walking, looking at a crow, and thinking about things. The persona responds to outside events then writes a meditative, or raucous, poem about it. Frost does that so much throughout his poems, and they're probably personas as well. Is he a guide for you or do you feel like you have to, in a sense, turn away from him and get rid of his influence?
DB: Both. Frost definitely was a guide. And when he died in 1962, I had read everything he had ever written, and had been written about him; I was devoted to him. This was while I was still living in Ohio, long before I ever came to Vermont. I think coming to Vermont requires of writers a kind of divorce from Frost, if you're going to be yourself. I have a poem called "Killing the Ghost of Ripton" about getting rid of this guy, getting him out of my life. Hayden Carruth has the same kind of poem, a haiku. It goes:
I live where Frost lived. So? It's a free country. Don't jump to conclusions.
Everybody who moves to Vermont, poets I mean, have to come to some kind of break with Frost, at least this used to be true, I don't think it's so true anymore. The world has moved on. Frost's influence is on the wane. But he was definitely a big influence on me at one time.
SM: What are one or two of your favorites, still?
DB: Of Frost's? "A Servant to Servants." I love that poem. "Directive." Those are the two that pop into my mind. It's those dark, longer narrative poems, like "The Black Cottage," that really stick in my mind.
SM: Have you ever tried to write your own "Directive"? It's the kind of poem that seems to beg you to try to write a version of it.
DB: Yeah, well, as I may have mentioned, I finished a little novel this past winter called Broken Wing. I've been working on it, off and on, for eight years. There's a kind of a prologue in poetry where you go up into the mountains to see this recluse who is the narrator of the story. The story ends with a bunch of twists and turns in the "plot," questions about what's real and what isn't. A friend who read it said, "You took all this directly from "Directive." I was totally unconscious of doing that, but she was right. That poem is way down inside me somewhere. As it turned out, I cut out the last thirty pages of the story so all that "Directive" stuff at the end is gone. The story still begins the way it did originally, begins with the "Back out of all this now too much for us" motif.
SM: What's the novel about?
DB: Broken Wing is about a bird with a broken wing who has to stay in the north country for the winter because it can't fly, can't migrate, and about a man called The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains and the relationship that develops between the two of them and how involved the man gets in the bird's struggle for survival. The book is really a meditation on birds and life and death and handicap and music. It's pretty plot-less, and it's short. It's just one of those things. I love writing about birds. I always have. I don't know why.
SM: There are a lot of crows in Moment to Moment.
DB: Right, mostly ravens actually. There are a lot of ravens around where I live. They are incredibly intelligent, communicative birds. They never cease to amaze me with what they do. I see them every day. We talk to each other.
SM: Let me switch directions. I want to ask you about jazz. There is not a lot of mention of jazz in Judevine, or maybe none. There's a little mention of it in Moment to Moment, I think. But you work with jazz bassist William Parker--as a duet, in collaboration, sometimes in a quintet. How did that start? And where did your love for jazz come from? When did it first start to bleed into your writing?
DB: Well, I fell in love with jazz when I was about 12 years old in junior high school. I was 12 in 1952, and, for reasons I can't explain, when all my friends were listening to Elvis Presley, I was listening to Zoot Sims and Chet Baker and the other West Coast Cool players--all white players. Then I discovered East Coast Hot, which was, very nearly, all Black players. Why I got obsessed with this music I don't know. But I remember very clearly sitting in my room getting stoned out of my mind listening to Gerry Mulligan's Tentet, maybe it was the harmonies, the rhythm, the swing; I don't know what it was, but that stuff blew my mind. The more I listened, the more I wanted to listen. It took me away from my life. It was like traveling in outer space. I was playing trumpet at that time. My interest in jazz just grew and grew and it's never stopped growing. And even though in Judevine there is no obvious connection to Black American classical music, I know that that long, loping, kind of prosy line that those narrative poems are written in, is directly influenced by my lifetime of listening to jazz.
William Parker and I hooked up about fifteen years ago. I read an interview with him in a Canadian jazz magazine called Coda and I wrote him a fan letter. I had never heard any of his music. And he wrote back, then I started sending him books and he started sending me records, and we got to be friends. We started working together about eight years ago. We did a quartet gig in New York. And then I had the chance when the Moment to Moment poems came out to develop this duet thing with my reading the poems and William doing music on lots of different instruments, not just upright bass.
Since then we've toured together with that show which is called Zen Mountains--Zen Streets. Boxholder Records brought out a double CD of a live performance of Zen Mountains in 1999. Then a couple of years ago in New York we did my The Fire of Compassion: A Found Poem for Black Music with a quintet, with William on bass, Hamid Drake on drums, Roy Campbell on trumpet and Kidd Jordan on tenor saxophone. Recently, we've done some trio work. We keep doing lots of different kinds of things. I have always had an intense love for music, almost all kinds of music, but especially Black American classical music.
SM: You're calling it "Black American classical music." Do you like the term "jazz"? Is it too general?
DB: "Jazz" is fine, I guess. I don't know. I think of it as Black American classical music, because it is a musical form that Black Americans invented. There are some white Americans who can play it, but there are very few, almost no, white Americans who truly contributed in any significant way to it. It's very hard to stand up and improvise and create something genuinely new. There just aren't any white players who have turned the world upside down the way Ellington or Coltrane or Ornette Coleman did. So I think of it as Black music. I think it should be thought of as Black music. And it's a unique musical form and attitude and it has a deep, rich history, even though it's just a little more than a hundred years old; therefore I think it should be called Black American Classical music.
SM: Having done this performing with Parker in various forms, do you now read your poetry live without music differently? Do you find that you want to have music accompany you now? To be engaged in that kind of setting?
DB: When I did that interview for "All Things Considered" back in March of 2001, Lisa Simeone asked me something like that. I still enjoy going a cappella [laughs], but it's harder now, much harder. That's why I've started playing ringing bowls and gongs and a chicken shake and flutes and percussion with my readings. I've gotten much more interested in making music myself to go with the poems. I don't do that with the Judevine poems, because I can't quite figure out what would be appropriate. But working with William and all those other musicians over the years has really changed the way I present my poems. My readings are much more performances now.
SM: On Zen Mountains--Zen Streets, you have a version of one of my favorite poems from Moment to Moment, "Bugs in a Bowl" where you go through it twice, or you repeat the last stanza or two. On the CD it's even called "Bugs in a Bowl and Out." You extend it for a long period. Do you do that in the readings now, too?
DB: It depends on the situation. Usually when I am by myself, I might repeat, for example, "over and over and over and over and over again and again and again," whereas in the print it just says "over and over" I might do something like that. If I've got room and time to stretch out.
When you listen to Black performance poets, Jayne Cortez for example, there's so much repetition. When you read Langston Hughes' poems, repetition is all over the place. This is the influence of song on poetry. All poetry was originally song and these poets are just closer to the source. The Book of Songs, that poetry collection that Confucius put together of poems written between 1000 and 600 B.C.E., all those poems were originally song lyrics, and the people sang them; they didn't say them.
In the 12 bar blues, for example, the second line is a repetition, often with slight variations, of the first. "I love you, Baby, but I hate to tell you so. I said, I love you, Baby, but I hate to tell you so." Repetition has always been a big part of song and therefore of poetry also.
But for most white poets, because they are thinking about the poem only as something on the page, in print, to be read, all these influences on the language from song, like repetition, have gotten a bad name. They're too unsophisticated or something. But if you come to poetry as an oral and an aural thing, something to be heard and maybe even sung, then repetition is part of the great tradition. In performance, with music, those repetitions become fabulously interesting. Whereas if you just write the same line down four times and read it there on the page, it's not so interesting. There's this emphasis on off-the-page and in-performance poetry--among ancient poets, non-academic, non-white poets and current performance poets. I've got at least one of my feet in that tradition. It's a different kind of poetic tradition. As I grow older, I want to cross-over more and more to that.
Continued . . .
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