“Brilliant & bright”: A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright [by Kristina Marie Darling]

“It has been an honor and a privilege to join in this weeklong celebration of Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry.  Today, I hope you will enjoy this feature of poetry and scholarship by TQ contributor Nick Courtright.  As a editor that prides herself on a commitment to rigorous critical discourse and innovative writing, I’m thrilled to offer this conversation across the boundaries of genre and discipline.”–Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. 

Screen Shot 2022-05-19 at 12.20.45 PM

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist.  He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. 

A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright 

Kristina Marie Darling:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more.  What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry? 

Nick Courtright:  I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example.

KMD:  In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences.  What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics? 

NC:  My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips, for example. Highly recommend all of those—brilliant and bright. And enjoyable! All of those poets surprise me constantly, and like all great writers, they mess with other writers, transforming other writers’ aesthetics and subject matter. It’s impossible and pointless (and less fun) to resist.

KMD:  I’d love to chat about the extent to which poetry and criticism overlap and intersect.  To what extent do you see poetry as an act of reading and response, a deconstruction of work that’s come before your own?   

NC:  I think all poetry is shaped by its precursors, whether hundreds of years earlier or the new release dog-eared on the bedside table. “Nothing new under the sun,” etc. But despite the derivative nature of all works of art, there’s much play at the boundary in which one’s own consciousness—itself shaped by the explosions of stars and deoxyribonucleic acid and junk streaming on Netflix—can contribute something at least with the illusion of newness. Even if it’s all just the shuffling of a preordained deck of cards, we can be surprised when we end up for four aces one right after another, and the more open we are to the alchemy of one’s own artistic collision with history.

KMD:  Speaking of reading and response, let’s chat about your current critical projects.  Can you tell me more about your case study of Whitman and the creation of meaning in poetry? 

NC:  The Proofs, the Figures is all about the expansive in poetic interpretation, and what better way to show just how much can be done trying to find what a poem means than to pick a single poem and really dig into it? For whimsical reasons I chose “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”—a rather simply structured eight-line poem—and investigated it for nearly 300 pages. And that was just the tip of the iceberg, because there was so much more that could have been said. The exciting thing is that a similar exploration could be done on literally any poem, including the one you, dear reader, are working on right now. The sea of meanings is bottomless, and there’s a lot of enjoyment in being Jacques Cousteau.

KMD:  This study seems like an ideal resource for educators.  What has your experience as a teacher and mentor opened up within your poetry?  Your criticism?   

NC:  This study wouldn’t have happened without my dozen years as a literature professor, and now that I’m no longer teaching, I see it as sort of my parting comment on how to instill a love for interpretive literary possibility within the future students and readers of the world. Because over all those years I was always trying to welcome students’ ideas into the discussion of what a piece of writing could mean; I was always aiming to avoid being that condescending teacher who tells them their reaction to a work of art is “wrong.” So I wanted to find a way to build a case to welcome those seemingly inaccurate or deeply personal reactions into the world of critical validation. And as for my own poetry writing practice, teaching kept me young, seeing firsthand how language and inclinations evolved with time, and how I had to keep my ears open and not become a dinosaur.

KMD:  What else are you working on, and what can readers look forward to? 

NC:  I’m working mostly on running Atmosphere Press, which I founded in 2015 and which now publishes more than 300 books a year. So that’s a major undertaking, and it’s a true privilege being able to work with those authors and also with a brilliant and dedicated team of book-making professionals. As for my own writing, I’m really enjoying writing domestic poems and trying to be comic and authentic and, for lack of a better term, accessible. While The Forgotten World was about contending with identity and the legacy of colonization and globalization while traveling to more than twenty countries, I’m now trying to turn my attentions to the local and the familial. Things like Taco Bell and bad shit I did when I was a kid. It’s a good time!

____________________________

The Ecstasy of Influence: The Presenter of a Poem as Part of the Poem

 

David Gale (1921–2008) was an accomplished American mathematician, a Princeton PhD who taught for years at the University of California, Berkeley, and whose contributions in mathematical economics included an early proof of the existence of competitive equilibrium and his solution of the n-dimensional Ramsey problem. The recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and a Fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the inventor of a two-player abstract strategy game called Gale, which was first discussed in Scientific American. It was marketed by the Hassenfeld Brothers (Hasbro) as a commercial board game called Bridg-It, which, though long out of production, can still be played online. From 1991 to 1997 Gale wrote a column on popular and game applications of mathematics for the Mathematical Intelligencer, and these columns were collected in a book, Tracking the Automatic ANT: And Other Mathematical Explorations. It is in this book that he writes teasingly of a certain poet with whom you may be familiar, a poet by the name of Walt Whitman.

Chapter 23 of this book, called “The Sun, the Moon, and Mathematics,” begins by quoting the poem in full, followed by this first sentence: “I hesitate to pick a fight with Walt Whitman, who’s dead and can’t defend himself, but I have to wonder why he was so turned off by a few proofs and figures” (Gale 1998, 199). He goes on to say, “To hear Walt tell it, the universe somehow became less ‘mystical’ when Copernicus made his discoveries about the solar system. Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Whitman, but I don’t believe knowing the laws of celestial mechanics need affect a person’s ability to react on an emotional level to the beauty of the night sky” (1998, 199). He then champions Keats—“that other great poet”—for having it right in his equation of truth and beauty, before seemingly grudgingly giving gratitude to Whitman: “But thanks anyway, Walt, for a poem about the night sky” (1998, 200). This, though, doesn’t prevent him from later remarking that “old Walt” found “diagrams” “so upsetting,” and that “Whitmanites should be grateful” that in this chapter Gale will not discuss numbers for adding, dividing, and measuring (1998).

Obviously, Gale was looking at the poem only through one particular lens, that in which the astronomer is presented as a villain and the speaker—here associated with Whitman himself—is the hero. It is as if Gale, despite the welcoming nature of much of his language and his good work bringing both family games and mathematical understanding into the mainstream community, has an axe to grind with this poem, and, therefore, with its poet. The subject of study here, though, isn’t so much about Gale as a “reader” of the poem, a man with an interpretation that he is entitled to have, but about how his reading of the poem acts as a frame for us, the readers of the poem through him. That’s the fundamental and significant distinction here: that when we read “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” in a popular math book written by an acclaimed mathematician, and that reading is followed up by a metatextual mocking of the poem, our ability to read the poem differently is challenged. Once again, the frame shapes our understanding of what it is we find.

In this what we are discussing is not the question of “speaker” we encountered in Chapter One; there is no special significance to who the “I” in the poem is, whether it is Whitman himself or a figment of his imagination or a “character” or a persona we see in other poems in Whitman’s oeuvre or through the whole of poetry, or whether the “I” is just an ingredient in an interpretation of the lyric genre as a genre of the dramatic monologue. Instead what we are discussing is a different kind of speaker, a frame personality that is “presenting” the poem to us for consumption. And when we as readers encounter a poem, we are susceptible to the influence of who shows us the poem, as how he/she presents it and what he/she says about it and also who that person is guides us toward certain presumptions about the meaning of the poem. Of course, there is no such thing as a wholly unadorned “presenterless” poem, as we are always receiving the text through some mediator, with the humanity of that mediator being variable from the practically invisible hand of the anonymous publisher to the howling commentary of an individual with a bone to pick, or an expression of love, that he or she wants to impart.

Still, though, there is something to be said for that howling commentary in particular, as the bias of the presenter has an undeniable impact on how the poem is read. Thinking back to the example of the imposing figure encountered in the dark alleyway or at the friend’s party, consider this difference: that figure is introduced to you by a benevolent associate who is implicitly or explicitly vouching for the individual in a congenial fashion, versus that figure being introduced to you by a local gambler to whom you owe a lot of money. Obviously, just as that figure was changed by the environment, that figure is changed by the one who is doing the presenting. Like this the presenter is an extension of environment and a more finely grained means of comprehending the context of a work; whereas all poems have an environment, the transparency of the presenter varies, yet the force of his/her personality, and his/her ability to make a rich argument as a human advocate for his/her own argumentative viewpoint, makes the presenter its own distinct feature in the contextual world of a poem’s mediation. 

As proof of this, Gale’s take is hardly the only example of a presenter frame for the poem that directs us down one particular path of comprehension, and even in the narrow realm of the scientifically inclined, which is just one of any number of possible presenter frames. Accomplished scientist and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg began a 1994 keynote article in Scientific American with this: 

In Walt Whitman’s often quoted poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” the poet tells how, being shown the astronomer’s charts and diagrams, he became tired and sick and wandered off by himself to look up “in perfect silence at the stars.” Generations of scientists have been annoyed by these lines. The sense of beauty and wonder does not become atrophied through the work of science, as Whitman implies. (44)

Like Gale, Weinberg assumes a negative understanding of the astronomer’s work in the poem, and uses this negative understanding to frame a high-profile article about the nature of scientific understanding. A reader, given this context for the poem, is unlikely to view it favorably, insofar as an entire article in a major scientific journal uses it as an oppositional piece, a sign of “what is wrong” with people who think the way the poem is here alleged to think. And this isn’t even as hardy a takedown as we get from perhaps the most popularly renowned science-oriented individual who has used this poem as an item suited for pillory, Isaac Asimov.

Asimov, in a 1979 Washington Post article that lists his byline as “author of over 200 books of science fact [and] science fiction,” like Gale begins his article “Science and the Sense of Wonder” by quoting the poem in whole as a prelude to throwing darts at it. He parodies fans of the poem as “tell[ing] themselves, exultantly, ‘How true! Science just sucks all the beauty out of everything’” (para. 1), stating that the poem’s point of view makes it “downright esthetically wrong” (para. 2) to work hard at the labors of science. Asimov, though, doesn’t stop at a belittlement of the poem and what he presumes to be the way its appreciators interpret it, but turns his attention to criticizing Whitman himself, saying, “The trouble is Whitman is talking through his hat” and that “the poor soul didn’t know any better” (para. 3). This he uses to draw the contrast between the understanding of the cosmos Whitman could have had in the nineteenth century and the understanding possible in the hyper-advanced future-scape that is 1979, in which knowledge of the universe is far more expansive. Asimov states that this new knowledge was “made possible by the works of hundreds of learn’d astronomers” and that “all of it was discovered after the death of Whitman” (para. 16), thus casting Whitman’s poem as an inexcusable instance of naivete, one of those ignorant things of the past—like old-timey flying machines or putting leaches on the sick—that we can look at with laughter and a slow shake of the head. When we read the poem as introduced to us by Asimov, who says “the poor poet never knew what a stultified and limited beauty he observed when he look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” (para. 16), the weight of Asimov’s fame and influence shape our understanding of the poem. Through this view, a poem perhaps about feeling sick and needing some fresh air is much more likely to be read as an aggressive vituperative against science, or at the least, against how science is conveyed to the public.

And lest it seem that this way of viewing the poem—as a sort of counter to science, something antithetical to it that must be viewed warily and even shamed—is a newer phenomenon, the inspiration for it as a pivot point for the sciences versus humanities would seem to have crystalized no later than the famous “two cultures” debate of the mid-twentieth century. This debate, started in 1959 by C.P. Snow’s controversial pro-science article “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” and viciously rebutted in 1962 by critic F.R. Leavis in his article “Two Cultures?: The Significance of C.P. Snow,” pitted the science and humanities against each other, and surely helped to fuel the opinions of the scientists we’ve been discussing, not to mention the paranoia of the humanities in the face of scientific advancement in the world and in academia. Even earlier, though, this type of view was not hard to find, as in 1940 the oppositional relationship was made clear in an article by Morris Goran in the journal Philosophy of Science. “The Literati Revolt Against Science,” if the title doesn’t give it away, is about Goran’s assumption of the literary-minded’s suspicion of all scientific fields, and it uses Whitman’s poem as a means of evidence supporting its point. The article begins auspiciously by quoting Victorian novelist George Gissing, who said, “I hate and fear ‘science’ because…it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all beauty of the world; I see it restoring barbarism under the mask of civilization” (Goran 1940, 379). That Whitman’s poem shows up soon after this is telling, and it associates the poem with “artists and poets who…desire more personal communion with nature through passion, emotion, feeling and sentiment” (Goran 1940, 381). This of course assumes that Whitman’s poem is taking an anti-astronomer position, and is valorizing the speaker as one who desires the type of natural communion Goran is asserting. Especially compelling is that Goran offers no textual analysis whatsoever to support his assertions, instead taking it for granted that this is how the poem is to be read. And via his assumptions, we as the reader—depending on our disposition toward Goran and his voice and general rhetorical position—judge the poem accordingly.

All four of these examples, though, are just one insight—the scientific antagonist, if you will—into how a presenter can alter how a poem is read. Who, unless they themselves be antagonistic to science, could encounter the poem in one of those four instances, presented as such, without viewing the poem askance, and as an aggressive threat to scientific inquiry and progress? Still, there are many other ways the poem can be presented, and our examples of scientists is actually a rather boutique zooming in on a particular kind of bias in presentation. In truth, that refracting lens accounts for only a small fraction of the number of presenter frames from which an audience can encounter the poem. And just as in his lifetime Walt Whitman the man himself, who “sold his works by hand” (Cohen 2017, 10) and delivered them from the podium, was sometimes the poem’s presenter, today the presenter is sometimes a poet at a coffee shop speaking the poem aloud from a position of reverence for verse of times of yore, and sometimes the presenter is a tenure-track scholar citing the poem in an academic journal article for the purpose of making some sort of rhetorical claim, and sometimes the presenter is someone’s boyfriend lying in bed showing the poem to his beloved, with all of these presenters coloring the way the recipient of the poem will understand it. Under these weighty presenters, and the ecstasy of their influences, the poem as we read it in the first two chapters bends under a new dictator. After all, throughout this entire book, who has been presenting the poem to you, and how has that changed your view of it?

With all of that in mind, we have to consider the most bounteous presenters of the poem in America today. You may have met some of these people yourself, and they may be how you first encountered this poem. Teachers, it must be admitted, are almost certainly the primary presenters of this poem, more so than any other presenter, even including Walt Whitman and his books. The poem is featured in dozens of anthologies which exist primarily for use in the education system, and a simple Google search for the words “the learn’d astronomer syllabus” turns up dozens of instances of this poem working its way into the classes of thousands of students every year. Courses ranging from the obvious (“American Literature”) to the more focused (“Whitman and Dickinson”; “American Romanticism”) to the upper-level (“Philosophy and Religion in Literature”) to the surprising (“Advanced Statistical Methods in Sociology”) give teachers the opportunity to display their own perspectives (and biases) when shaping students’ understanding of the poem. Every single instructor in these courses, and dozens of others, has a chance to present the poem to students as a “fun little piece of literature” or “a poem about how science sucks” or “the only Whitman short enough for us to squeeze into the calendar” or “something about which you’ll have to write an essay” or “a text that will be on the final exam” or “a beautiful poem with a lot of different interpretations.” Even instances in which teachers merely put the poem in front of students, without advocating for any particular interpretation, will see students’ readings affected by the reputational authority of the teachers’ own biographies, or the relative gravitas of the institutions in which the reading is taking place. That, and all of the preceding imaginary presentations of the poem are plausible, and will influence how students approach the poem. 

For example, the teacher for the “Advanced Statistical Methods in Sociology” course (Chesley 2013) presents the poem as encouragement to students to work hard and persevere in the face of the complexity of mathematics, and the feeling one can get that all of the calculations don’t truly mirror reality. The syllabus for the course, after presenting the poem, states, “You may sometimes feel like all the mathematical machinations we produce do not adequately capture the true meaning and complexity of the world, much like the narrator in this poem,” before advancing the hope that students “will become more sympathetic to the role of the astronomer over the course of this semester.” This is a rather measured and thoughtful use of the poem to make a point, and to steer students toward the particular aim of having patience with their studies, though it too presents to students only one way of understanding the perspective of the poem’s speaker. This measured display, though, is only one example of a teacher’s presentation, and it benefits from having been written down, unlike the nearly unable-to-be-studied spoken and ephemeral presentations the poem receives in unrecorded classroom settings across the country. For those many, many instances, each and every one of them is a chance to influence how a reader understands the poem. And of course, an enormous part of how students will respond to the poem is this: How much do they like the teacher of the course? If the teacher of the course is inspiring and energetic, or who has earned the students’ trust by being a good listener, the poem is much more likely to be read closely and thoughtfully than if it is being presented by a teacher the students dislike.

All of this is to say that there is something quaint and almost naïve about the idea of reading a poem in a “clean room” environment, as we discussed in Chapter One, or even with all the weight of historical knowledge, as we attempted in Chapter Two. Because, even when these methods are utilized ably by an earnest interpreter, they remain partial if they do not acknowledge the impossibly unavoidable influence of the immediate frame in which a poem is encountered, and the essential bias of the one presenting the poem. Despite this, it’s true that up until now, through all of these adventures and misadventures in attempting to “get at the meaning” of this poem, we have been talking about the poem, and we’ve had it and its terms as the star of the show. That, it turns out, is not always the case. Sometimes a poem is in such a big environment that it almost disappears, even if it is complete, and the impact of the environment in which it exists is so overwhelming that the poem itself is less a subject of interpretation than a tool for the interpretation of something altogether different. In this kind of mediation, the poem is just a leaf on a tree deep in the distances of the scene, a leaf relevant less as a leaf, and more as a means of comprehending what is happening elsewhere in the scene. It’s this flipping of roles that we’re about to check out, to see just what happens to a poem when it’s just a piece of the puzzle, rather than the puzzle itself.

_______________________

A Portfolio of Poetry by Nick Courtright 

 

Oblique Letter to Young Son 

as He Confronts Adolescent Loneliness 

for the First Time 

 

 

When the water is all around you 

you know you are the land, son. 

 

Unlike your surroundings 

only your tears and soul are wet, 

 

the rest of you a buoy 

flicked like a pistachio shell 

 

into the merciless eons of outer space. 

The sun is still a ball of fire, 

 

it is the high-efficiency bulb 

of God, by which he writes his songs 

 

and crucifies his child. But

let’s not be bleak; you, son, 

 

are the land, the firmament 

filled with surprise, like a girl 

 

out of whose hand a giraffe’s tongue 

grabs a snack. In this mystery 

 

we get only so many chances to live, 

to fight off the last breath 

 

and pay our taxes just one more time. 

When the body is an ark 

 

all the animals are in you 

and you can call it what you want – 

 

salvation, damnation, 

another day at the mercy of the tides.

 

______________________________________

Sick Child as Hailstorm

 

There is nothing like a sick kid

The boiling furnace of a small body

 

The sweat of it

Pathetic like lightning

 

Whose thunder you can’t hear

A little mystery of love

 

The child’s hands reaching out

The cup of chicken noodle shaking

 

When the child is like this

My love is too much to bear 

 

The hail hits the lawn

It rips through the trees

 

Every surface of nature is pummeled

It is like a coyote

 

A coyote carrying a rabbit

I can’t hear the thunder

 

I can only hear what is breaking

I put a cold cloth on the child’s forehead

 

There is no reconciling 

The sacred with the self

 

The profound paling 

Beneath this fever this child

 

The hail piles up

It is piling up on all our bodies

 

It is too much to bear

This love

 

 

_____________________________

Apples

 

 

What am I supposed to do 

with the glorious wreckage 

of a burnt out police car 

or heart except cheer? 

To travel the world is one thing 

and to travel the mind 

is the same thing so nothing 

really changed no matter

the continents crisscrossed

as this grassless backyard 

is the same royal nothing 

as any other rest of the world 

vast as hereditary injustice

in which people should wear

masks but often don’t. 

And what of it but my children 

still here stunting daily 

in their underdevelopments 

like unwatered wildflowers 

as the school is shuttered 

and would you believe 

it was named after Robert E. Lee

and what twenty thirty 

years from now will the kids 

make of the shapeless weekdays 

or the cumulus of teargas 

gesturing across the interstate? 

The time to wander prodigal 

may be over but I’ll wonder 

where wandering led. I’ll say

I’ve always been here, watching. 

My fear is a sparrow 

who trembles in a thunderstorm. 

All foolish kings hoard

what they want to hoard. 

I’ll lock and deadbolt the door

and while the fires of correction 

raze the wicked architecture 

of so many centuries’ cruelty

I’ll try to raise my children 

to be sweet like an orchard.

 

________________________________

Facing Mecca

 

 

 

 

The call to prayer 

reminds me of all I am not, 

 

my heritage like gum 

on a Walmart parking lot. 

 

It calls through the evening, 

the sun a memory 

 

and the terrace a plateau 

for my son’s future test scores. 

 

It calls through the evening 

and elsewhere a monkey 

 

on its chain backflips 

for dirhams, and a cobra 

 

dances its sultry terror 

to the music of an instrument 

 

I cannot name. What difference 

would it make if I am clipped 

 

by a motorbike, if I cannot smile 

at an old woman, her niqab 

 

concealing what it is about her 

that I wish to know? If I gave in 

 

to what I want, what sort 

of tiled mosaic would I be, 

 

flattened against a world

I will soon cease to remember?

 

Now I am still, I am still, I am 

on the terrace and the call calls 

 

from every direction. 

Do I pray? I try, but I can’t.

 

 

____________________________________

 

American Idiot

 

 

I see a pack of stray dogs 

chase a tourist down the street 

and as he swats at them 

the rest of South America looks on, amused. 

 

My mere existence, too, is comical. Orwell 

in “Shooting an Elephant” remarked 

that a colonist is always in a battle 

not to be laughed at and now for the first time 

 

I truly understand that. And Orwell, 

with the brown faces staring him down, 

what did he do, even though he didn’t want to? 

He shot the elephant. So I can lose 

 

my passport and get rained on 

and fail to bring the toucan into the sight 

of my binoculars, while Irman makes it look so easy.

I can run sweating like a fool sweats 

 

in search of something I don’t know what

but regardless the role of every white man in this world 

is to shut up and take it 

because so much of this bed you for yourself have made. 

Go to Source
Author: Kristina Marie Darling