An Interview with David Bergman

A special episode of Burning Bright, featuring an interview with David Bergman, author of Plain Sight.
14 minutes

TRANSCRIPT

Occasionally over the past few months, we’ve listened to intern Ruby Taylor’s interviews with Passager writers. On this episode of Burning Bright, the last in that series, Ruby’s interview with Plain Sight author David Bergman.

RUBY: So, David, have you always been a poet, or did you come to it later in life?

DAVID: Well, I started writing before I could write. I would create these hieroglyphics and read them to my parents. And so I’ve always been a writer. In grade school, I started writing poetry. And in junior high school, I had a wonderful teacher, James C. Morris, who was a poet and he was just wonderful and he taught me everything that I know about poetry, the essentials of how to be a good writer. He was a fascinating man. He was a black man from the deep South, and because a lot of the students were Jewish, he mixed in his explanations of things Yiddish words, which was really quite remarkable. He had me write a sonnet for weeks until I got it all right. And what all right meant was not just that the rhymes were pure rhymes and that the meter was iambic pentameter. But that every word counted. There couldn’t be any redundancy or even any words that were close in meaning. You couldn’t describe something as lovely and beautiful. You had to make it so it really counted, especially in descriptions, using the concrete rather than the abstract.

RUBY: Did college hone those poetry skills you got from Mr. Morris?

DAVID: I went to Kenyon College, which was famous for its English department and for its poets. It was an extraordinary experience. And I came to Baltimore to study at Hopkins in the English department. And we had to take medieval courses and Renaissance courses and all of that.

RUBY: You alluded to those English poets. Did any of them speak to you more than the others?

DAVID: Wordsworth was particularly important writer for me because in college I had begun to see that what was important in a poem was the minute to minute changes that occurred in the psychology of the writer and the language reflecting that minute to minute perception, second by second perception. For Wordsworth, I don’t think that there was a point that the poem was moving toward. It was simply moments of tranquility, the moments of insight, that momentary intensity of the experience, either memory or fantasy or seeing or hearing an owl screech. That’s what was important in the poems.

RUBY: One of my grandmothers was a hospice nurse, and she told me that the end of life is really hard to deal with, and that really, all you can try to do is find things that allow single moments to be good. Like a little dab of lemon oil on somebody’s wrist, and they smell it, and that’s a moment of lightness and joy for them.

DAVID: Yes, yes, I think the not smelling the oil is probably is as important as smelling it so that the comparison of those experiences begins to register. And in the poem as in the care of the elderly or Hospice where you’re not trying to make people well; poems should never make anybody well. But they can produce delight. And wonder. And also horror and depression. All of those things are part of that experience. So I guess it was that the end of the poem is experience, the experience of the poem word by word, and not that it comes to a major point.

RUBY: David, can you talk some about your writing process? How do you go about actually writing a poem?

DAVID: It changes, and I think it changes for every poem. I used to be able to write poems in longhand; at least the first draft was in longhand. And unfortunately I have Parkinson’s, and that has made it difficult to write in longhand, but I still do it even though I can’t read back much of what I write anymore. The act of going through an experience, line by line or word by word, even if all of those words you throw out or don’t use in the end, the process of going through that experience, that language-lived experience, is essential, and it’s really what the first draft is doing; it’s trying to look at all the possibilities of expressing what it is that you are experiencing and finding some language that will do that. And then, my poems tend to expand. I type them up on the computer, and then they expand and contract and expand and contract, until I can’t make them any better.

RUBY: Is that process more like hours or weeks or months or what?

DAVID: How long a poem takes? Sometimes poems have taken—I just finished a poem that has taken me, I think, 20 years to write. And other poems have taken me as long or longer.

RUBY: One of the things in Plain Sight that fascinated me were “The Man Who” poems. How’d you come up with that concept?

DAVID: “The Man Who…” poems started out as a classroom experiment. I had a class of students who were very uncomfortable writing about themselves. So I gave them the exercise of writing about themselves, but in the third person. And as I always do in class, I also write the poem that I assigned in class and wrote “The Man Who Was Not Loved Enough”—or a draft of that. And then I realized that this probably is a way that I could write not only about myself—because you never write about yourself; the “I” is always someone else related to you, part of you, maybe, but not the whole of you. My dissertation, by the way, was on Robert Browning and dramatic monologues. So I really thought of the speaker as a dramatic function. So “The Man Who . . .” became all sorts of people, not just me, but much more than me.

RUBY: Funny you should say that. When I was reading The Man Who poems, it was hard to tell whether the speaker was you or you at an earlier point in your life or someone you’d totally made up. It’s just so interesting the way the boundaries between self and other in your poems just disappear.

DAVID: One of the first poems that I had that got recognition was called “Elective Surgery,” and it was the mind of a person just before a transsexual operation and thinking about why he was doing it. And I got a call where they assumed that I was transsexual. Which was a great compliment. Who is the person who said, “I am the other”? We’re always “othering” and bringing otherness into ourselves. And we need to do that all the time. You go to a bar and you meet someone, and you have to begin to evaluate what’s going on here. Is this person to be trusted or not to be trusted? And you begin very quickly—or at least I begin very quickly—to build up some kind of psychological profile of that person. It may not be true at all; I may be utterly wrong. But I need to do that. Well that’s what empathy is, trying to get into the other person’s skin. So it’s very natural for me to do that, and I wish I could do it even more.

One of the other poems that was very difficult for me to write was the poem about the woman who has had a miscarriage and her sense of that baby’s continuing to live. And once I had the nerve to read it at a reading, and a woman after the reading came up to me and sobbed and said, “That’s exactly what I went through. That’s what exactly what I do. How could you as a man know that?” I said I was really pleased that I had gotten it so right and that men are able to sometimes enter into women’s experience.

RUBY: How do you define yourself? Are you a poet? A male poet? A gay poet? A Jewish poet? How do all those pieces fit into the way you think of yourself as a writer?

DAVID: Well, I don’t think of myself much as a writer. I think of the poems. The poems are what’s important, not me. That may be an answer to your question of how the man can be so many different men. Because they’re not me; they’re the poems. And that’s one of the things I learned at Kenyon, that poems have to be read in themselves. That I am gay, that I am Jewish… that plays a part in some of the poems and some of the language of the poems, some of the experiences of the poems. But that the poems are limited by that? It seems to me that a Christian reading the poem or Hindu reading the poem would be outside of the realm of understanding? That, I think, would be a mistake.

RUBY: Some of your poems deal with the loss of people that share various memories with you. Can you talk about that phenomenon and why it’s important?

DAVID: You talk to your friends and you talk about, I don’t know, what you did this summer and you can share that those kinds of experiences. But when you get to be older, there are fewer people to share it. You know, memory is so constructed in our minds as our perceptions are made by our minds. It’s nice to have someone who’s there who can fill you in on things that you’ve forgotten or remind you of things that you didn’t want to remember.

RUBY: Yeah, I guess to the extent that our memories are part of who we are, when we forget things or when the people who were there with us are no longer there, it’s like we’re losing a part of us; we’re dying in a way.

DAVID: Losses are one of those things, both growth and destruction. And as you grow older, you are more aware of that, of the duality of that. That time, just evolution is both a process of destruction and creation, of both death and life.

RUBY: Earlier, you talked about going straight through school without a break. I’m in college now, and I know people who took time off between high school and college or who plan to take some time off before they move into graduate school or their careers. Do you think one approach is better than the other?

DAVID: It’s wonderful to flounder. That was that was the mistake I made, which was to go to graduate school right after college. I needed a break. I needed to grow up. I need to have a life, maybe going into advertising or maybe becoming a bartender, sweeping the streets . . . It really didn’t matter. The odd thing was that as a child, I wanted to be a writer and teacher. And I grew up to be a writer and teacher. But my mind has been able to flounder any number of directions. So if you can’t do it in the body, you can do it in your mind.

We’ve been listening to intern Ruby Taylor’s interview with Passager writer David Bergman.

To buy David’s book Plain Sight, subscribe to, contribute to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, go to passagerbooks.com. Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.

Again, thanks to Middlebury College student and Passager intern Ruby Taylor for her work on these interviews.

For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.