Interview: Writer Gregory Sherl
...they seem to border more on porn than literature...
Amy Temple Harper and NAILED Editors conducted this interview over email with writer Gregory Sherl. This is the second interview conducted with the author.
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NAILED MAGAZINE: As a poet, you do some unconventional things with line breaks, and tend to favor a prose poem formal style. Can you talk about where that comes from, and whether or not you’re resistant to taking advantage of things like line breaks? What is it about the prose poem form that attracts you?
GREGORY SHERL: I was a fiction writer before I even thought to think about poetry, so the block text of the prose poem has always been easier for me to understand and produce than those with line breaks. With Monogamy Songs, I never set out to do a collection of prose poems—the first few just turned out that way and then the next few turned out the same way and then I was like, fuck it, here we go. Whenever I write a lot of dialogue in my poems (this is the case for I Have Touched You, my out of print chapbook from the now defunct Dark Sky Books, as well), they always come out as prose poems. I think (generally, anyway) that it’s easier to follow a narrative in this format.
NAILED: Where does the confusion around what kind of book Monogamy Songs is actually come from? Are we reading what we should consider poems, or are they not-poems? Fiction or not fiction, or not quite non-fiction, so possibly it’s a combination all of these? Or is it none of these, and you think of the collection as something all together different?
SHERL: In its more infant form, the pieces in MS were more singled out as individual pieces. They consisted of titles and were less massaged together, coming off mostly as individual entities. So they looked much more like prose poems. I had originally set out to make the book a more standard poetry collection. (And, as it is now, I’m not sure I would consider it a poetry collection even though I call it a poetry collection in bios and whenever I mention the book to strangers or almost strangers. And goddamn if I’m not even confusing myself now.) When I decided to cut the titles, the book felt more whole, more fluid, but also less defined. It’s funny how it works out that way.
When I sent the final manuscript to Kevin, it was never called a poetry collection. On the title page, I had it listed as a “man-made memoir”. That didn’t make it to print, but I think it’s a good definition for the book. I think all memoirs are in some way man-made. I realize that all memoirs are (wo)man-made, but like a man-made lake, a memoir is only partly natural. There is nothing organic about dipping into your mind and piecing together dialogue that happened months or years or decades ago. There’s nothing natural about recounting the devastating parts of your life for strangers—airing greivences, detailing a bad fuck, sleeping with a bottle of pills under your pillow.
Parts of Monogamy Songs are obviously exaggerated; some of it not true, some of it too magical to ever exist. Those are probably my favorite parts.
NAILED: Talking process with poets seems to be an important discussion these days, with so many new books reading like comprehensive “projects,” the seed idea of which is often quite interesting. How did you compose, and then order or chronologize the pieces in Monogamy Songs?
SHERL: The entire process of how this book became a book is very much a blur. I wrote the first quarter to a third of it during my brief stint as a copywriter in an advertising agency. (If my old boss is reading this, I’m sorry—we both know I was shit at it anyway.) I wrote the poems in between writing TV and radio spots for local car dealerships. I think some of the sections of MS read hurried and desperate, and I think that may be part of the reason, coupled with the fact that the narrator (i.e. me) is hurried and desperate through much of the book.
NAILED: Was the insertion of just a Capital letter for someone’s name to protect identity, or was it symbolic of something else?
SHERL: In the end, the capital letter is really just a capital letter. I liked how it sounded, it’s as simple as that. We can go even simpler though: I’m lazy as hell, and it’s easier to just type a letter than a full name. I was originally inspired by Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine. And through that book, he used capital letters when naming characters who flew in and out of his poems. I loved the intimacy it created. It’s like we already knew them. The characters weren’t even introduced, because why introduce someone we already know well enough to trim their name down to one letter? I really respected that.
Z wasn’t always Z, though. After the breakup, I talked to Kevin about changing the initial to try to hide her identity, and we decided on Z. I think it actually works better this way.
NAILED: What is the role drugs play in the writing?
SHERL: I’ve never done a drug in my life.
NAILED: How do you feel about being classified as a “Post-Confessionalist?”
SHERL: Goddamn, I’m just happy someone thought about my work enough to classify me as something. That’s kind of cool. There is so much writing out there, why choose mine, you know? So I find that flattering. But to be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what “post-confessional” even means. Is this a good thing? Or am I being fucked with and I’m just too dumb to figure it out? Thanks for asking me this question. Now I’m nervous. So I’ll ask you: How do you feel about me being classified as a “post-confessionalist”?
NAILED: Not sure exactly how I feel about any kind of label, as history tends to be a much better judge of who fits in what categories, and for what reasons. And complicating that even further, how would confessionalism in poetry be something that we could get beyond? That doesn’t strike me as a movement that has a beginning and an end, though I suppose I’m not averse to being put in either a “confessional poet” or “post-confessional poet” category. Now then. I’m curious. What are you working on now?
SHERL: I’m in the early stages of writing my first novel, though I was rereading some of the pages I wrote last week, and they seem to border more on porn than literature. I hope this means I’m doing something right. Lately I’ve been doing much less poeming, but I’m in an MFA program for poetry, so I can’t quit it completely. I’m slowly working on my thesis, which is a collection of poems about Joan of Arc. In my book I save her so many times she falls in love with me. It’s kind of awesome.
NAILED: Last but not least, when is the last time you nailed it?
SHERL: I found a tree seven feet or so high. I found two more and built hills to rest them on. I was sweating.
Gregory Sherl is the author of Monogamy Songs (Future Tense Books, 2013), The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail (Mud Luscious Press, 2012), and Heavy Petting (YesYes Books, 2011). His poetry has appeared in The Rumpus, Columbia Poetry Review, diode, Los Angeles Review, and Poets.org. His fourth collection, Glow, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in early 2014.
Amy Temple Harper was born in S. Korea. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Smalldoggies, Spork Press, Nailed Magazine, and Haggard and Halloo. Her latest book is Cramped Uptown. She lives in Portland, Oregon and is currently working on a memoir.