Josh Bell is a poet and the author of Alamo Theory (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) and No Planets Strike (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Paul Engle Fellow. He was also a Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and he earned a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Bell has taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and is a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University.

This is an amazing space. It is all quite cinematic, because it was raining outside but now we are in your office, and everything is tranquil and fine. Some dim lighting. I borrowed the portrait of Gertrude Stein from the English department upstairs and brought Pound’s Make It New from Grolier and the collection of Jack Kerouac’s cassette tapes from my place. We are putting them together on your desk, making this altar for the spirit of poetry or something.

House House:

Let’s start with this. A question about the questions of poetry—before we tackle something like “What does it mean to write poetry today?” Is that even something valuable to ask? There’s so much drama about how poetry is dying, there’s no career and everyone struggles, as if poetry occupies this magical and otherworldly province of our intellectual and social life. Is poetry first of all a special practice that’s any different from other types of literature? If so, what exactly makes it different?

Josh Bell:

If you've hung around for a while, it seems like every generation's ready to proclaim poetry dead. Yet always the geniuses rise up and keep it alive. Now everyone wants to ask you if AI will be the death of poetry. AI will not be the death of poetry. The internet will not be the death of poetry. Our main problem, and the thing that makes it different now, is that we have scientific evidence suggesting that the world might become uninhabitable to humans. When Shakespeare wrote “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” was he imagining a world where we might no longer be able to breathe, was he imagining a world with no sun? Maybe not, but these days it’s difficult to NOT read it that way.  

House House:

That fact is seeping into poetry too. There are people writing about ecological endings.

Josh Bell:

You can also say, legitimately, that every generation thinks the world is going to end. There's always some need in us to imagine apocalypse, you know, almost in a Christian way: the coming end of the world helps keep us honest. From the pressure of the end of days we might begin to monitor our behavior. Young poets in my classes are dealing with this pressure constantly. How to write the lyric for this world we’ve always thought of as permanent. How can we imagine writing a poem that, even after we're gone, will be here after we're dead. We can no longer believe that to be true. There will be a moment when we can no longer stand on the ground or know that we're not going to have light to read by. Our eyes won’t matter. And that tension, right now, is what makes poetry a special practice. It’s a way of attempting to hold the world still, on the page, so that we might not lose it so quickly. 

House House:

It sounds like the desire to turn something from your limited living experience into some message of beauty and truth to pass down history, over births and rebirths—something similar to the burden of a poetry of mimêsis we inevitably carry even since Ancient Greece. 

Josh Bell:

Yes but even cyclicality is dying as a metaphor, which is to say, as we lyrically sometimes do, hey, each year in the spring, the flowers grow again, if the world blossoms again, maybe I, too, can reborn, or even as recently as Stevens, who wrote that “nothing endures as April's green endures.” But we’re already seeing how the endurance of green is limited. That cyclicality is no longer metaphorically available. We cannot be made immortal by cycles. We cannot be made immortal if we write a powerful enough poem. The world is finite and closing down. We might want to start shooting our poems into space.

House House:

For me, it is surprising to hear that people back in your days in the Iowa Writers Workshop (which to younger writers today appeared to be an absolute utopia) no less thought poetry was over. Yet somehow it carries on and there is still progress.

Josh Bell:

The fear is always there. Maybe because it fails to lie and most people (including myself very often) don’t want to hear the truth. The big generations fore and aft of my generation (the baby boomers and the Millenials and Z) were active politically, attempted to change the world. A lot of poets from my generation played with comic and surreal tones, a way of whistling past the graveyard. The failure of the world itself is difficult to confront, but there are models. Jorie Graham’s poems show us a way. Merwin’s. 

House House:

I totally see your description of this sentiment of reacting to a much more intense generation closing-down especially in Jorie Graham’s two earlier collections, Erosion and The End of Beauty, both published in the 80s. This seems to be aligned with the intellectual history and political/aesthetic movements during that broader time period: debates over the promise of systemic change and revolution, literature’s use in society, its radicality or impotence, the determinacy or indeterminacy of meaning, the breakdown of past political imaginations, etc.

Josh Bell:

Yes and there’s just so much going on in the world, so much world. There are so many claims on our attention and so many claims on poetry. For me it helps to turn away from those demands and enforce poetry, for myself, as that special act, an act with no outside claims on it. The act of continuing to write without a sense of its effect in the world, without the promise of effect, is the most radical thing for me. Just insisting on being human and insisting on defining what a human being is, to me, is enough. I don’t need any immortality out of it either. I don’t need to be remembered (please remember me!) but for me the writing is just staying buoyant, keeping your head above water.

House House:

Art as that which resists. Not only resisting time but also other external forces.

Josh Bell:

Most resistant to reduction, to translation, to assimilation. Resistant to the flattening of discourse that’s happening on the internet, on Twitter, where everybody’s like oh this is the new slang word or this is the new idea that pops up overnight and everybody uses the word or talks to you about the idea. The internet is a kind of saming chamber: we get more and more the same. It is difficult to find little pockets of weird unexamined human beings (I’m starting to sound like Baudrillard here) who are creating their own languages in the dark and without witness. It's like everything's so out in the open it's difficult to find privacy. But I think poetry remains strange, or can. If the poem's written in English, you can't even really translate that poem into English. You know what I mean? Like you can't really explain it away in its own language. Poetry should always be kind of bottomless and a little spiky and a little unwilling to bend to your interpretation. It shouldn’t be taken as symbolic. Your interpretation will always be lesser than the poem. That’s the beauty of it.

House House:

In the real world though, isn’t it just because these poets are supposed to writing poetry that do the resisting to be sort of independent of the commercial market institution, they are forced to retreat into the ivory tower, into these universities and MFA programs—and become in another way not so independent again; it is just that they are dependent on the academic complex now and not the capitalist one. 

The harsh fact is that even the most successful poets cannot afford to be only a poet today. Even the best selling poets don’t get to earn a living by writing and publishing, but they take fellowships; they have to teach; they get sponsorships they detest…

Josh Bell:

Branded alcohol that they pretend to sip while writing. Yeah.

House House:

And cigarettes. Of course. Something like that. What was the professional prospect of being a poet when you were younger? Was that—a career based on writing and publishing your works and making a living off them—a viable option after, say, getting an MFA?

Josh Bell:

The norm then was you wouldn’t get a job with the MFA, with only the degree itself, but you could get your book written, and then published, and then maybe you could get a job. 

And that’s no longer true. We thought we had a pretty difficult situation back then, but it’s only worse now. 

And there was this feeling that, with the popularity of the MFA, we were in the middle of a great change. Everyone wanted to be a poet. And now there’s even more proliferation. The incredible success of the American MFA system has given us very very many poets. And this is a good thing in that poetry is slowly being opened up to new voices, voices until recently kept at the margins. But it’s also just a lot of poetry, to the extent that you (I) simply cannot keep track of how many writers there are. There are books out there that we are not reading right now, and they are probably fantastic. But how do we find them in the middle of all the crashes? There are so many of us. Very different from back in the day when there were, you know, a handful of Modernists who all knew each other. I read somewhere where Ezra Pound and HD went to a costume ball together when they were young.  

House House:

A different paradigm where people used to seem to all know each other in their whole circle.

Josh Bell:

Yes it seemed there were like twelve Modernists making all the decisions. There are so many of us now, which is a good thing. A democratization of the genre. Another good thing: there are so many of us that, I think, it’s hard for power to keep track of us. So far they’re not coming after the poets, but I don’t know how long that will last. 

House House:

Something I have been noticing more and more is that there has been a very particular type of writing that aims at fellowships—the writing that deals with issues; this kind of issue-oriented writing. 

The issue at hand could be climate, or something else like social justice. These works first claim to have solutions to these problematics that give us anxiety or dread—and when you ask them what the solutions really are, they always respond to you: Well, I don’t know; it is all embedded in the ineffable complexity of this novel, memoir, poetry collection as “good literatures do”.

Josh Bell:

That bit has always been true, too. If you look at all the Pulitzer Prize winners from the inception of the Pulitzer Prize till now, what you're going to see, up until recently, are first-person lyrical poems, determinate and precise, usually in the plain style, usually written by white people, not too broken up, not too experimental, this straightforward-American-laconic-speaking-voice with a clear speaker, addressing a clear context or clear issues. That's always been the center and that's still true now. It's just that it sort of opened up for a little bit with other voices. 

House House:

Yes. So we’ve talked so much about the external forces that have an impact on a poet, and now we are getting into the personal. What is the force that makes you believe in what you write—makes you want to write? What is that for you?

Josh Bell:

That sense, above, of creating a private space, a quiet space, on the page, a hidden place where strange things can happen without apology. 

I also get inspiration from other art forms. 

Stand up comedy, for one. I like how vulnerable they are. There’s this belief that stand up comics become stand up comics to control the way that they're laughed at—something that developed as they were being laughed at, for all the wrong reasons, when they were children. And now they get to play with this vulnerability (maybe the performance of vulnerability) which I think is true of poets also. 

Acting and actors also: actors, like poets, are always trying to figure out how to be a human being. Actors like poets are like alien visitors to this planet, recording what it means to be a human and to breathe and to make decisions, the sending our reports back to the home planet. 

But at the same time, of course it's harder for poets, who must operate without a body. Actors get to stand, move, but the poet somehow has to bring the body and the breath to the page. 

House House:

I totally see this desire you mentioned to communicate without fully dissolving yourself in the crowd, without losing your own idiosyncrasies doing so, in your own works. Alamo Theory, for instance, is a collection that is difficult to pin down to a specific form (it is prose and poetry and narrative) or a specific range of contents (it is about music, and technology, and TV shows, etc.).

Various disciplines, distinct histories, and strange yet charming philosophies meet in your work, especially in poems like “Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (after Ezra Pound)”: just admire this title. The poem is about heavy metal, celebrity culture, Modernist poetry, with that subtle critique of appropriation—it takes a lot of bravery and ambition to be dealing with a wide range of topics like that. What made you want to do it?

Josh Bell:

I tend to write in series, it just works out that way. So I’m always looking for a new series. And then my friend Matt Guenette sent me a poem around that time which was entitled something like “Vince Neil’s Exercise Routine” and it had a bunch of funny lines in it (he also wrote a sestina called “Sestina Aguilera,” so you get the idea) and I wrote him back as Vince Neil and that’s how all that started. I basically took the idea from Matt (and I thanked him in my book for it) and then I took the idea away from Matt. And as a speaker Vince Neil the hair metal singer was perfect for me: I am in no way a famous poet, but when my first book came out I was surprised by how people actually read it. That’s what you should want, you know: you write a book, people read it. But somehow it still shocked me that other eyes possessed the work now. A kid I knew peripherally, for example, got a tattoo of one of my lines on his body somewhere. That freaked me out. I’d operated writing poems alone in the dark for so long that the little touch of success I had with the readership made me kind of fearful. And I think Vince Neil—who had to deal with fame for a time but now is past all that for the most part—was a perfect way for me to write about that anxiety without having to write about it out in the open. 

House House:

William Carlos Williams’s idea of poetry as a scholar’s art—and Auden’s ideal library of having really little poetry but full of history books, memoirs, books about the science of rare metals or gardening or cuisines…essentially poetry is almost a form of cultural criticism. But there’s almost so much burden from that duty.

Josh Bell:

Like I said I think particularly writing about pop culture or through it was a way of me writing about my life without actually writing about my life. And a way of me writing about heavier thematic concepts without having to name them. I think the speakers of my poems are worried about their complicity in American cultural evil, yet American cultural evil isn’t named outright. The speakers in some way embody it. 

And also I looked to pop cultural figures like we would look to figures in myth. Pop culture was a way of finding common ground with everybody via these mythological structures of shared text. The problem is that pop culture expires, so it can limit your audience, which is why I'm less interested in pop culture than I was before.

House House:

What did you get from these rock stars that eventually stood the test of time then?

Josh Bell:

I can’t be the one to say whether my poems are going to stand the test of time. I hope they will. I think as long as the voice seems alive on the page, as long as the poem is an event and we can feel the personality of the poet behind it, it kind of doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. It’s all good and well to have recognizable themes, but for me it’s never the thematic that draws me in, but always the voice. Eudora Welty, when asked if all the good stories had already been written, said something like “New voices always appear.” Voice, I think, is the draw, not what the voice speaks of. And it’s the poet’s job to never write something containable enough that it can be captured by the reader with a highlighter in hand. It's the poet's job to never write a perfect enough poem.

House House:

That is very punk and post-punk of you.

Josh Bell:

It’s partially that spirit of being “beautifully unschooled”, right? There was this ad that the Pixies used to recruit Kim Deal as their bass player, and it read like: Band seeks bassist passionate about the music, but please no chops. Please no chops—to refuse to engage in what people already think of as proper. Neil Young was/is doing that with Crazy Horse. To avoid roteness and try to stay improvisational, vulnerable, restless.

House House:

It was quite famous that none of the members in New Order could really sing or knew how to handle the synthesizers and drum machines correctly—that was the reason why they could make tracks like Blue Monday because that song’s intro was so minimal and special that only someone who didn’t care much about technicality could come up with that. There is art that happens when you have so much passion and so much to say but not the proper or traditional way to say it—when you have to make it new. 

Josh Bell:

There is sincerity in that, right? Certainty, I think, is antonym to sincerity. Chops are dogma. Certainty is the problem, to believe in the idea as a given, whatever the idea may be. Belief in the idea beyond the belief in the voice. No ideas but in things, as the man said, but also maybe no ideas at all. 

Some poets know where they’re going and they deliver. Some poets are hoping to discover something that sounds true enough to know. I’m always with the uncertain. We want a confident tone of voice, yes, but a tone of voice confident in its lack of confidence. Otherwise, with certitude, the poem is also dogma. Most of the good stuff happens when the voice seems improvisational (making a poem seem improvisational is hard work), when you're just writing a line, and then you overhear yourself, and then you consider what that line may mean, and then you consider what you think you think about that meaning. A simple way of saying this, as Jorie Graham once said in a workshop, the poet writes about what they feel and then also what they feel about what they feel. And what you feel in one line changes in the next, so you undercut it, you undercut it, or you revise it, or you call yourself out on what you just said, you empty it out to see if there’s any truth to it. That makes you seem like a living consciousness on the page. It's the questioning of your own perceptions and your own obsessions.

House House:

I remember in our workshop Jorie Graham mentioned that poetry should be an event. Not the referral to an event but in itself an action: it happens. It is an act of your life or your mind. 

Josh Bell:

When I remember Jorie saying it she’d said it a different way, that you write from the jeopardy and not about the jeopardy. Jorie Graham is a great teacher and I’ve been lucky enough to have some good ones. Rodney Jones is one of them. We had an independent study once at SIU where we just went fishing (he’d bought a new bass boat) and talked about books. When I was younger, I knew poets like William Butler Yeats or Langston Hughes or Marianne Moore and I knew that they once lived, but I don’t think I really realized there were poets out there, in the world, actually alive and living normal lives. This is one reason why, beyond what wisdom they can impart to you, it’s so important to have teachers. You can watch them and they show you how to be a weird and specific human being. The first time I met Jorie for a conference in Iowa, she was running a bit behind on the schedule. I was nervous to meet her because she was a hero. And when she came down the steps she called my name and apologized that it would be another hour or so. And she handed me a $20 bill and she said, Would you go get some bagels for everybody? I took it very seriously and bought the best bagels I could think to buy and I made sure to return the change. Looking back on it later I found it, also, very funny. And just like that your teachers show you how to be a person. So much of poetry is not about the poetry of it at all. It is just the way we think and the way we live. And in that way I am still a student of Jorie’s and Rodney’s and I always will be.