Ron Slate spent more than two decades in the corporate world before returning to poetry and writing The Incentive of the Maggott, an award-winning collection praised by the likes of Robert Pinsky. We talk about his roots in poetry, how those "lost" years weren't so lost, what it's like to be the guy who sees things late, and how his life was forever changed when he saw Buddy Rich's teeth.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 27 - Buddy Rich's Teeth and the Corruption of Reality
"It's said that the sources of writing are mysterious, but the sources of not writing are pathological."
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show and find all our past episodes at the iTunes Store. You can also find those episodes, get on our email list and make a donation to the show at either of our websites, VMSPod.com or chimeraabscura.com/vm. You can find us on Twitter at VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. So looking like another great month here at Virtual Memories Manor, my listeners, downloads are approaching last month's record number. And it's not like there's a single episode that's driving it either. More and more days, it looks like people are just discovering the show and then downloading a bunch of episodes, which is pretty gratifying, but also kind of a problem. The thing is I've recently listened to some early episodes and I, well, I realized how bad the audio quality was and how totally stiff I was on the mic, especially in these intros. I read, I sounded hollow. I just did not know what I was doing, I guess. But nothing comes easy. Anyway, this weekend I interviewed a guest who was on at the beginning of 2013, Ron Rosenbaum. And it was sort of struck by how much easier it was, even though I'd known Ron for years, there just was a flow to the conversation and a sort of looseness that I'm just not sure I had when I was starting out. So thanks for sticking around through the growing pains, is what I'm saying. Now this episode features a conversation with Ron Slate, a poet who lives near Boston and he discovered the show when I posted the Great D.G. Myers episode, reading Make up a Full Man. I offered to come up to his place during my annual trip to ReaderCon in Burlington, Mass, and we got together two weeks ago to record, which was a lot of fun as you'll hear. Now the ReaderCon trip was also a blast. I only went for one night, but let's see, I got in a follow-up podcast with the great book critic, Michael Durda, caught up with another past guest, my pal Nancy Hightower, made plans for an episode with the science fiction writer Paul Parr who I met there last year, and I got to catch up with the great Samuel Lard Delaney, this wonderful author whom I've known for, shit, almost 20 years, 17, 18 years, but we see each other less and less nowadays for a variety of reasons, it's me, I admit it. Anyway, while I was talking to Delaney on Saturday morning, just before heading out to interview Ron, I saw someone else in the lobby of the hotel and I realized she was a pal from college whom I hadn't seen, oh God, since 1993. So yeah, this was a whole weekend of dating myself, I guess. Anyway, my friend Ariel is a literature professor up at Bowdoin University, and we made plans to get together and record about Dante and science fiction and her life and times and all the other stuff that makes for a fun podcast, you know? It's funny 'cause when I think about it, I only got up to Riederkahn at like five in the afternoon on Friday, I know I crashed early by like 10, 30 or so 'cause I was so zonked, and I was out the door by nine a.m. on Saturday, so it looks like I was pretty darn busy, that's my idea of a vacation, by the way, I also did a lot of talking at Riederkahn in somewhat loud environments, so my voice isn't in great form in this upcoming episode, but it's still a fun talk, you'll see. Now, Ron Slate was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1950. He earned his master's degree in creative writing from Stanford University in 1973, and it is doctoral work in American literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He started a poetry magazine, The Chowder Review in 1973, and that was published through 1988. In 1978, Ron left academia and was hired as a corporate speech writer, beginning his business career in communications and marketing. From '94 to 2001, he was vice president of Global Communications for EMC Corporation. More recently, he was a chief operating officer of a biotech life sciences startup and co-founded a social network for family caregivers. Since 2007, he's been reviewing poetry and prose at his home page called On the Sea Wall. That's at RonSlate.com, I'll spell out the URL at the end like I always do, and he lives in Milton, Massachusetts. Ron's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate, and other venues. His first book of poems, The Incentive of the Maggot, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005, and the collection was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Prize and the Lenore Marshall Prize of the Academy for American Poets, Academy of American Poets, my bad. The collection won the Bread Loaf Writers Conference of the Fake List Poetry Prize and the Larry Levis Reading Prize of Virginia Commonwealth University. The great wave, his second book, was published by Houghton in April 2009. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Ron Slate. [MUSIC PLAYING] Why don't we get started with talking about that? Tell me your path to poetry, at this point, and your path from college into the business world and back into the arts. Well, there is a very beginning to the story because I remember the very first poem I wrote at age 16. I had a part-time job at the Zilden symbol factory in Quincy, Massachusetts, which is my home. And the Zilden symbols are prized by drummers and orchestras around the world. I had a part-time job there Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. And I also had been taking drum lessons for three years. And one Saturday morning, I was at the top of a very high ladder, 12 of 14 or 16 feet, cleaning fluorescent light fixture, and one of my idols, Buddy Rich, came into the formulation to the fabrication room with Mr. Zilden. And Buddy had very big teeth. And you could always see those teeth because he was constantly chattering. He was also a karate master, but that's beside the point. And he was proceeding through the room and coming closer and closer to my ladder. So I came halfway down the ladder. And he was at the base of the ladder. And I reached down to shake his hand. And all of a sudden, it was one of those moments where all the chemicals change in your brain for some reason. And I saw Buddy Rich and his teeth in the middle of this cosmos, the master of what I wanted to be, a drummer. And everything just seemed to be swirling around him. And all of a sudden, I seemed to understand ambition and art and what it means to strive. And so I went home, and I decided that I wanted to write an article about that experience for a classroom assignment, a high school English classroom assignment. But when I looked down on the page, I had written a poem called Buddy Rich's Teeth. And I can't quote it exactly. But that's really when it started. And I think there's this exhilaration when you find out that you can actually use the materials of your life. From that point on, most of my poems for the next couple of years were written for girls that I was in love with. As should happen in the high school, sort of, and into college, sort of here. The word did you go to college? I went to the University of Massachusetts. And Amherst? Yes. Did you study under anyone in particular? Did you have a particular angle within poetry? Well, it was very fortunate that I went to UMass because I had been admitted to many schools. And at the time, my father and I were in one of our periods of great conflict. And he decided in the spring of 1968 that I was going to pay for my own education. And I couldn't afford to pay for any of the schools where I had been admitted. So my father was involved with the liquor lobby in Massachusetts. And he said, well, then I'll make arrangements for you to go to a school that you can pay for. And he literally trotted me up to the state house and sat me down with the president of the Senate. It was humiliating. It was a humiliating experience for me. My man's name was Kevin Harrington. I'm exposing something now to the world about just how corrupt this guy was. But he's-- Corruption in Massachusetts. Go ahead. I know. I know. And this guy Harrington literally-- he asked me what I wanted to do. And I said, well, I want to be a writer. I want to be a novelist. I want to be a writer. He literally picked up the phone and called somebody at UMass. And he said, I have a young man here named Ronald Slate. And he looked at me. And he said, and he wants to be a journalist. In other words, he was also going to determine what I was going to do. And so in the fall, I went there. And I paid for my tuition via my earnings from my ice cream truck. But going there was a stroke of luck. I never expected to, because I worked with a few different poets who were there. One was Donald Jenkins, who had been one of Robert Lowell's students at BU with Ann Sexton and that whole crowd. And while I didn't know anything about his poetry when I went there, and I never really got into his work. But he manifested something to me about what a poet is. What was that? Well, he had a beard like John Berryman. That was one thing. And I think these are the things that one looks at in one's potential mentors, how the person moves across the room, how the person talks about poetry, a hint at how poetry could be integrated into whatever profession you have, has happened to be teaching. But I've always seen-- I've always perceived a gap between writing and teaching, although so many of my friends who are poets or writers are teachers. But to me, those things have never been fertile ground. There's no coincidence between them automatically for me. Although my friends who are teachers are incredibly dedicated, I probably would have been a jaded teacher. So anyway, I worked with Donald Junkins, and the young James Tate was there. And there were elderly poets, too. There were Joseph Langland, who had been with Robert Francis, who was from Amherst, the great Robert Francis, and there was J.D. Reed. But also, I had creative writing teachers who aren't known today as writers, but who exposed me to-- I had a Wallace Stevens seminar when I was a junior. And so much of it went over my head. But one day-- well, the professor would ask the campus poets, the teaching poets, to come in and read Stevens. And one day, James Tate came in. He didn't read. He recited the man on the dump. And it was another one of those buddy-rich moments when I said, that's what I want to do. That's what I want to be able to-- I want to be able to walk into a room and speak words like these. And ultimately, I came to adore Stevens and perhaps to understand it and appreciate it more than I did at that moment. But it was Stevens who said that words are everything else in the world. And he also said, a poem is the cry of its occasion. And it's that latter thing which is stuck with me by-- he also said that the words of the poem are the poem. There's nothing else outside of it. That was something that would irritate a poet like William Carlos Williams. And Stevens said, "A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words. A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words." And that's the rub. That's what's going on in poetry today. It's the tangles between all the different schools of poetry are whether a poem is going to be spoken by a recognizable identity that seems to be addressing things in the world as they are given to us, presented to us. Or if the poem is going to sit on the page as material on the page solely, a thing of language solely. And I love Stevens because especially in his shorter lyrics, which are my favorites, like a postcard from the volcano is one of my favorites, where when he seemed to be more contained space-wise, he would be less philosophical and just more strange, more concentrated in suggesting the psyche that was the cry of the occasion, the voice. And your own work from the two books of your poetry that I've read do seem very integrated into the real world, into the life being lived, I suppose, and the phenomena observed. How did you evolve that style, I suppose? Or I guess we should go back to what took you away from poetry for a number of years before you managed to return to it. Well, as for the latter, that's a great puzzlement. It's often said that the sources of writing are mysterious. But when we ask what are the sources of not writing, we say they're pathological. But actually, they're equally mysterious. And we don't know. There are poets who publish early and flare out or just do the same thing forever, or don't know, can't seem to adapt. There are poets who seem to have a very narrow range and write the same kind of work more or less until they stop. And then there are poets who don't publish very much. Elizabeth Bishop published less than 100 poems in her lifetime. And there are poets like me who finally get it. In middle age. So I'm known as the person who sees things late. And I didn't learn how to revise until my early 50s. I was finally taught. And I was a very avid student. Tell me about the path away from poetry after college. What was your life-- where was your life taking you, I suppose? And what was that moment when you had the return? Yeah. Well, I went from UMass to Stanford to get a master's in writing. The degree was an AM at that time. And they don't give the degree anymore. What was AM? It's an MA backwards. Ah, OK. It's just the same thing. I had the MA/LA, the master of arts, liberal arts-- yeah. --at St. John's. We call it the evil Spanish woman because of the Mala thing. And well, now they have a PhD in creative writing, which is one of the stranger notions. Yeah, well, it's all about pedagogy now. But anyway, I went to Stanford to get this writing degree. But at the same time, I took Old English, Middle English, all these in order to go on and get my doctorate. And I went to the University of Wisconsin to do that. And so I was clearly on the path to become an academic. But I spent five years in Wisconsin. And one day, William Stafford came to town. And I ran the Poet to Reading series there. And I invited him. And that evening, we had a packed room. And it occurred to me that there were no professors from the Department of English there, other than the teaching poet Ron Wallace was his name. And it struck me quite hard that here we had a National Book Award winner when the NBA's were the top awards in poetry. And this is it. This is literature. This is the literature of the moment where you like build Stafford's work and not. You have to take this in. And then I saw the same thing occur when other major poets came in, like C.K. Williams would come to town, and David Wagner. And I just picked that out as one point of dissatisfaction or disillusionment with academia. I felt like-- and I didn't like what was going on in the Department of English. I didn't like the behavior. And then people say, well, then you went to corporateania, and you went to run departments. And there must have been all kinds of office politics and so forth. And I would say, yes. But it's the same kind of stuff at the Department of English. Did you feel that the stakes were different in the corporate communications world then that academia mattered more, and it shouldn't be as subject to these sorts of politics? Academia simply felt claustrophobic to me. I come from a family of entrepreneurs and lawyers. And also, half of my family is European. And it just seemed like there was more out there for me to grab onto. And that didn't yield itself to me until my late 40s and early 50s, as far as material goes. But I left Wisconsin. My wife and I-- my wife had our first child there in 1978. And I decided that we were going to-- Nancy and I decided that we would come east. We would look close to our families and that I would go out and see if I could find a teaching job. And well, first I looked around the country and I decided I didn't want to go to some of these places. And I thought I would just come back. And coming back east in the late 70s with some degrees in English meant that I could write a complete sentence. And if you could write a complete sentence, you could get a job in-- That held up in the early 90s too. My ability to actually construct a sentence in English and a paragraph, God forbid, in a memo, was enough to get me hired repeatedly. Yeah, that in a very nice suit, bought at discount, got me this job. And I went to work at Wang Laboratories, which is a defunct company. But at the time, it was a leading company in word processing. So I started in writing documentation for the machines. And I hated it so much that I got a part-time job. I was moonlighting. And I was moonlighting for a guy who was doing publicity assignments for my employer. And I would get these little cassettes. It would be consists of interviews with users of Wang systems. And I would have to write an article which then this guy would take in place. And one day, as I was working at my boring job writing documentation, the director of public relations came into my office. In fact, he drove up several miles to find me. And he stood in the doorway of my little cubicle. And he said, I know what you're doing. And I'm going to get you fired. He turned around. You walked halfway out, then he turned back. And he said, on the other hand, maybe I better hire you. And a couple of weeks later, I was transferred to the corporate communications department, this beginning my long-- I hate the word career. We have to cop to it. In communications. And that guy who was standing in my doorway was none other than Ted Leonsis, who went on to be one of the-- you might call him one. Maybe Steve Case founded AOL, but Ted certainly was like number two or number three there. And now, today, he owns-- The Washing Wizards. --Hockey team. And he was my early mentor in business, certainly. He was also a crazy guy. And a few interviews with him, but they're all in sports related. Well, he had a big bust of Elvis in his office. And he was very glib and very funny, and just knew how to throw his weight around, too. And I went to his department. I was shown to my desk, and I was employed by him. And he said, you know, I never interviewed you. So come into my office, we're going to have an interview. And I sat down. At the time, I had a beard. And the beard was red. My hair is brown. And Ted said to me, so what color are your cubic hairs? And right then and there, I knew that I had made the right decision. Did you give him an answer? I did. I mean, it was called upon to give one, so I did. And from there, you managed to climb a corporate ladder along those lines? Well, from there, there was a need for a speech writer. So I became a speech writer. And then I ran a small group of speech writers there in corporate communications. And when you're a speech writer, what happens is that you go up to the executive suite, you go upstairs. And you sit down and you talk with, let's say, the president of the company, who has about five minutes to give to you. And he says, well, you know what I want to say. Just go down and write a draft, and I'll read it over the weekend. And so when realizes that he really doesn't know how he wants to say it, he may know what he wants to say. And in the course of writing speeches, you end up writing corporate strategy. Because until it takes the form of words, it's-- You're shaping the language of how they're perceiving or understanding their direction. Exactly. And the next thing you know, you are his de facto aid. Consigliere is also a good term. That's right. That's right. And that was fun. Wang at that time was growing like crazy. But in 1984, I felt like-- well, I looked at Ted. And I looked at other people I knew in the business. And I saw that, well, there's advertising. And there is event marketing. And there are the international flavors of all those things. And I felt like I really wanted to learn advertising. And so I applied for a job at a smaller company called Stratus Computer. And I went there to run all of communications. And I took some of my Wang friends with me. And I stayed at that company for almost 10 years before I went on to EMC, which was my most interesting job, certainly that I ever had, in most demanding. Yes, sir. Well, EMC, when I arrived there in 1994, was a wash and cash. Because the need for storage capacity in this tremendous booming of information, now in all forms, images and words and voice, was booming. And what we used to think of as computer storage-- the computer storage, like in the old days, it was taped. It was always some subsystem. In fact, that was the word that was used. It was something that was attached in the back of the server, with what we call the mini-computer at the time, with a mainframe. And what happened was that that whole category was ripe for elevation into its true mode of importance today. What we call the cloud, really, is just a storage server. Yeah, rapid elevation of that model. That's right. And EMC had the technology edge over the other companies and started to grow like crazy. And during the time I was there, the stock split four times. And it was the number one stock in the New York stock exchange for that whole period. So I got lucky. And it was also a very aggressive sales company. And there was a lot of internal competition. And communications and marketing in general was regarded as a third-class quasi-necessary thing to do. But sales was really an engineering. And although I may not be the typical computer macho man, I am very competitive. And there's that line that is spoken by the character Billy Bean in Moneyball, where he says, I hate to lose even more than I love to win. And I simply did not want to lose there. And we created a communications capability there. The people who I've worked with over from company to company to company, many of those people are my closest friends now. And it was a very collegial environment in our group. And we went all around the world. We had a global responsibility for that. And also, the internet was finally there. And so I was sort of there at the beginning of the corporate implementation of the internet, the very first big corporate websites and so forth. And it was before social networking, but it was the beginning of all that. But still seeing how that changes the entire paradigm of reaching out to customers and to consumers. It's got to be something, which I know takes us away from the poetry side of things. But I'm sure we're going to find the point of which this all returns to it. One of the things that I've experienced and got 19 years of Trade Magazine publishing is the way in which boilerplate language detends us. And kind of makes it very difficult to create on your own when your day-to-day consists of reading press releases and a corporate speak in the most boring ways that it's constructed. I refer to it as the communication is key to a win-win relationship model where it's just spouting cliches and jargon. How did you manage to work in the world where you have to have that sort of corporate speak but still manage to develop a poetic sensibility or return to a poetic sensibility? Well, first of all, I think in speech writing, one learns to write in someone else's voice, but which is also a communal voice. That is the voice of all of those employees speaking together via some sense of what the corporate culture is. And corporate culture is an actual thing. I know that it's just one of those phrases one tosses out. But every company I worked with had a certain internal psyche that radiated down from the people on top. It's true. It's a contagious, infectious, sometimes toxic thing, sometimes inspiring thing. All of these people aspiring together for something. All of our livelihoods tied together. That's the positive view of it. The negative view of corporate life is that there's just so much waste that one is willing to-- I saw when Bush won, went into Iraq, I just saw that as a kind of corporate thing, where you can just waste the lives of all these people and waste all this resource through a lack of understanding, a profound lack of understanding of what history is, in order to achieve some near-term goal, which would look great on paper. In time for re-election. That's right. I've seen those things happen without the violence, without the deaths in corporate life. In addition to cheating and outright criminal behavior, I've seen that too. But how did you get from corporate life back into depository? I feel that my life has been studied with these moments of chemical change. And in 2001, I knew that technology industry was in trouble. There was a lot of talk amongst the senior executives in our company. They saw that things were softening in sales. And this is a company that was growing like crazy. The internet bubble burst was approaching. And in the spring of 2001, it became very clear that this very large advertising budget that was managing was going to go away. So I was becoming prepared for something else. I didn't know what it would be. And one day, I opened up the Wall Street Journal. And I went to the arts page. And there was a poem by Frederick Seidel. And at the time, he was writing the poems that ended up in his book called "Eriocode," "Eriocode 2 and 2." And this was a poem. And the poems were named after the months of the year. And I looked at this poem and listened to it and spoke it out loud. And there was something about it. It's snarkiness, it's reference to the materials of the world. And it's attitude that really turned me on. It also sounded very familiar. And I think what I felt was kind of sounds like me. But it's not me. I mean, I'm not-- I don't write a Ducati motorcycle and all that. So I started to write some poems that had sonic patterns that were like his. They were just little things I wrote on paper. And I took one down the hall to my friend Craig Moody, who is a prose fiction writer. And Craig said, yeah, this is an actual poem. This is a poem. So I ended up leaving EMC in July of 2001. And I decided that given that the economy was really pretty crummy and because they gave me a nice severance package that I would go home and write. And I started piling up poems. And my dearest friend, Floyd Sclute, who lives out in Portland, I would send the drafts to him. And finally, he said, you really just ought to put a manuscript together and see what happens. And so in 2003, I put it together. And I sent it to a few places, one of which was the Bakelist Competition, which is the breadloaf competition. And Louise Glick was the judge. And I didn't win the Bakelist Prize. However, I received a letter from her that said, yours was the only other man. You didn't win, but yours was the only manuscript other than the winner that I liked. And would you be interested in working with me? Because she was going to become the judge of the Yale Younger Competition. So I wrote back to her. And I said, I'm 53 years old, and I'm too old for the Yale Younger Poets Competition. Thank you very much. It was so kind of you. She didn't take that. She wouldn't accept that. She ended up calling the house. She talked to my wife. She tracked me down. And I ended up working with Louise. And it was a revelation to me. She taught me so much. You've been a reader of her work before? Well, yeah. I mean, ever since her first book, her first book was very startling to me. It was called First Born. And her poems were, I first discovered her work in the Young American Poets Anthology, in which I first saw the work of Charles Simic and Diane Wieckowski. And all of the young poets of the time were in that anthology. So she taught me how to revise. And she's very candid. And she is a magnificent teacher. I'll answer your question about her work. When her second book came out in the '70s called Meadowlands, called House on Marshland, I felt it was too pretty. And I kind of lost interest in her work. And I didn't pick it up, actually, until the late '80s. And then I was quite amazed by-- Which is in touch with poetry while you were in the-- not writing, but reading while you were in the business world? Yeah, I was always reading poetry through that time. But what has occurred over time is quite a significant change in my tastes. Well, I started-- the first poets I really loved were the beat poets. I could understand why that would change. OK, go on. I mean, the first book of poetry that I owned was Lawrence Ferlingettius, Conan Allen of the Mind. And I loved the powerful conversational language. And when I was in college, the poets, I liked the best word, Frank O'Hara. You know, the loose-- you know, the verbosity, and just the glory in telling stories and not being concerned with conclusion, more immersed in the feel-- in the density of experience. I also love Robert Creeley. I love the concision of Creeley. I mean, poetry is always battling between affirming invention over assertion, over statement. That's the eternal tug of war. And these things are-- I love poets whose work suggests that tension, that sense that they're not just going to regard language as plastic. And they're not just going to think that being confessional on the page creates some kind of a lure. I look for a battle between a feeling that words can do so much and words are so ineffectual, and the feeling that one writes out of a kind of sublime ignorance, as opposed to having reached conclusion. And now I'm going to tell you about it. That's a problem for poets who are very committed to a certain moral framework, or poets who, let's say, want to talk about-- write about the persistence of racism in the United States. What will prevent your work from becoming a series of oddbed pieces written in lines? And when one reads those poets who do that so well, whose point of view is based on some kind of firm commitment, but may give you an experience on the page to make you feel, again, what it was like to feel racial hate for someone. That can be an incredible experience. I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts. There were no black people, no black families in Quincy. So it's important to me to accept the variety of poetry. Some people don't even like to use the word poetry. They say, there's no such thing as poetry. There are only poetries. You're either for us or against us. And that leads to some very disturbing-- that has led in history to some very disturbing acts of cruelty. In terms of excising artists or particular-- Absolutely. I mean, it's-- the story of Mennelstam is the story of a poet who was crushed by other poets. It wasn't just-- it wasn't just Stalin. It wasn't just because he wrote a poem about Stalin. It was because there were other poets who objected to what he did and who dropped a dime on it. And he went back into business after the first book. The incentive of the maggot. Yeah, after that happened, I decided that, oh, well, I felt like-- I was sort of exhausted after that. And I was spending too much time around the house. But on the other hand, I did not want to go back into another large corporation, just didn't want to do it. So I was recruited to go and run a very, very small, not-yet-profitable life sciences/biotechnology company in Waltham, Massachusetts. And I was the only non-scientist in the company. And I had a very grand title. It was the chief operating officer. But it basically meant trying to take all of the science and to find ways of developing products and making some money. And also conveying that outside investors, customers? Yes, I also was involved in raising money for the company. And so you had some sort of narrative angle in addition to working there on an operational level. And that led to working on a second book of poems? Yeah, almost surprisingly, I did start writing new poems again. The publisher of the two books was Houghton Mifflin, now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Houghton Mifflin has gone through some hard times financially. And perhaps it has-- It's not your fault. It's OK. Yeah, the poetry just didn't sell well enough. But I had an opportunity in 2008 to publish the second book. And I jumped on it. I decided to do it. I look back on it now, and I feel that I wish I had waited. And even if I wasn't going to be able to publish with Houghton Mifflin. Why is that? I just look at the work now, and I feel that there are things in it that I could have improved on. And there are things I would have taken out in new poems that I would have put in. What was the change from the one book to the next? What do you see, thematically or structurally, that changed for you in terms of the poetry you were writing? I like the tautness in the first book. And the first book is animated by this discovery that the whole world can provide material to you. And you can actually write poems. I mean, this amazement of being able to write again. And also, the exhilaration of working with other poets and being influenced by them. After the great wave, I stopped writing, stopped cold. 2009, 2010, 2011. I started back in, again, at the end of 2012, slowly. But during that time of, let's say, allowing the reservoirs to fill up again, I started to write a novel. And I'd never written an extended piece of prose fiction before. And I recently finished it. And it's about a playwright who went to Vietnam as a cook, came out of Vietnam, wrote an award-winning play in the early '70s, and then never wrote another play until 2004, which is the runtime of the story. And he thinks he finally has an idea for a play after all this time. And he also buys a restaurant. So all of this in the past comes back. What led to the idea to start working in fiction? I think that I wanted to write around the idea of the novel. I think that writers read for themselves very selfishly. When I want-- when I need to be stimulated, I don't want to read a conventional novel, which gives us too many things that we already understand. And the American novel also tends to want to comfort the reader. Who do you read in prose? Well, I review books. So there's always quite a variety on my desk. I just finished reading a wonderful novel by Stacey Durasmo called Wonderland about an aging rock star who hits the road for a tour of her comeback album in Europe. And the reason I love the book is that she really allows herself to present the density of the speaker's actuality. She's not owned by plot. And it's very much about the density of this person's psyche. Now, the language itself doesn't leap about the way more experimental-- what they call experimental writers-- the way in their mode. But it was still a very satisfying novel to me. And it's a particular book that kind of started you on the path for the novel that you're working on. Is there an author or someone you would-- Yeah, yeah. I read a number of pieces of literature. They're almost all European. One that really got to me was a memoir by the French writer Pierre Guillotat. And there is a Sejora or a blank space in between each of his sentences. You have to make a little bit of a leap. And it's very much like poetry. One reason there is a sense that the language is always on the brink of failing, of not quite being able to or perhaps even resisting to get at the possibility of clearly stating exactly what is going on. Another Wallace Stevens quote is that he said that realism is a corruption of reality. And so when you have a third-person narrator who seems to know what's going on in the heads of all these different characters, that's what passes for realism. But, in fact, it's the most unrealistic thing you could put on the page because none of us knows what anybody else is thinking. You can recall conversation. We're not that great at figuring out what we're thinking ourselves. And I think what's disturbing to me is just how automatically one accepts writing like that as realism. And if you don't read anything else about that, do you deprive yourself from other views of actuality that may be more demanding on the page, but ultimately, for me, you're much more satisfied. What's your writing practice like? Do you set up time each day? Do you have a particular schedule you would hear, too? Well, sometimes I maintain a site, a book review site. It's not really a blog so much as my personal site, but also with book reviews. And sometimes I think it's been my ruination because it one must post regularly in order to retain an audience. I've given myself a month off recently, and I find that there's no damage at all to my audience out there. They're not exactly waiting for my next book review. That's an angry email, isn't it? Yeah. But my practice consists of running away to write whenever I think I have to. I don't mean running away out of state. I just mean going up to my room or to a quiet place in the neighborhood. And I was writing most regularly with the novel, so I just get up in the morning and I would go and revise and perhaps write a new chapter. The chapters are very brief. And also the material is written in short paragraphs, very short paragraphs. And those paragraphs, being on different topics, can actually move around by when you're editing. And you're back to writing poetry also, you said? I am now, yeah. Do you see it becoming another collection, or is this thematically working in one particular area? I'm not a project poet. I'm not a project poet. I don't write poems, a series of poems that I'll follow a certain kind of pattern or preoccupation until I realize I have enough for a book. I just don't think that way. My energies aren't sustained that way. So-- and you don't have to try to write a number of poems that have certain materials in common because at a certain point of your life, those materials will relate to each other. So I'm not really even thinking about a book. I'm just grateful for any poems that begin and want to explain to me how they want to be written. I often write about the ocean. I have been writing about scenes that take place near the ocean or on the ocean. Your second book is The Great Wave. Do you-- and this is maybe getting into the therapy side of things-- do you feel regret at all for not writing poetry for those years that you were in business? No, I don't have any regrets at all. Because I'm filled with the way that hatred for myself. But that's just because I'm finding ways not to write every day. Like you said, it's pathological. As I read the first book, especially, I've found it so interesting to see art made out of something that corresponds to my business-oriented life. To see something that wasn't poetry for poetry's sake, I suppose, something that could make art out of these experiences that weren't necessarily mine. But I knew enough people in the biotech world, et cetera, that it corresponded. Is there a piece you'd like to read from your work for us? Oh, I'd be happy to. It's been a while since I've been into this. But since you mentioned the work poems, there is a poem here. I still believe that work is the ignored aspect of art in America that people just don't want to address the idea of the business as its own magic and its own art to it. OK. So I'm going to read a poem called Reunion. And it's about a reunion of a number of people who work together. Reunion. I attended the reunion, talk, brisk, but diluted by time. A colleague raised his glass to praise me. His legacy here is legendary. Not one of us knows what I was like. News of former colleagues, vanished friends. This one was commended. That one was broken by onerous obligations. And she is dissatisfied, but no longer ill. Looking down six stories, I saw a woman approaching the office tower across the avenue, her right arm swinging, the other slightly bent at the elbow in motion, yet not released, suggesting all that remains to be done. Next time I looked out the window, darkness had taken the city below. There was the time in Sydney, in Barcelona, Sao Paulo, in Rome. Apparently everywhere I went, I said, and did remarkable things. Alloft, above cities, one encountered women with no taste for nonsense. I told a lady in Amsterdam, I was an astronaut. She said, you're too small. I said, this is an advantage in a capsule. Crude forsakings of faces and cities, the memory of my farewells makes me sad. Their word play, so much charm, but not much else. Yet I lived in a larger world. My worries, paltry and ridiculous, disappeared in dialogue. And then I was alone and pleasantly spent. Of our buildings, corridors, and movable walls, what I recall is a slender wrist and hand reaching for a slice of toast sliding down the exit ramp of the toaster, the cafeteria, a place of suspensions, surprising postures and revelations. I was adept at envisioning a world of invention and speed, then swiftly abandoning it for another, until it seemed no great matter to enter the world, to think you are entering, earning, providing. At the revolving door of the office tower, she paused, an extraordinary act, a woman stopping cold like that, making me a stranger to our past. I had some beautiful work. My last question, which only comes up because of what you told me about with the college experience. Did your folks support your poetry aspirations and did they get to see you publish your first book? My parents did get to see me publish the first book. I think that, well, I think my father was always puzzled by me. He could never understand why I didn't go to law school. And I'm not really, you know, I'm not really too sure. I don't think my mother got to it at all, but I think in a general sense, you know, they were happy to see my name on the cover of the book. I have a number of other relatives who responded more specifically. I just never know if, you know, supportive parents, or they're a good or a bad thing when it comes to being an artist, or if it was better for you, you know, going into business, then if they were happier with that, then, you know, "Mom and Dad, I'm going to be a poet." Well, my mother is a Holocaust survivor. She lived in France during World War II, and the whole family there was hiding from the Nazis. And in 2010, I had the opportunity to go return to France, and I wanted to go to the town where they had hidden. And I took two of my daughters with me, and one of them had a fiance at the time. That's my daughter, Jenny, and that's an our husband, Dean. And we went there. But my mother really did not want me to go. -Really? -Yeah. She, in fact, she became quite angry that I was going back and said, "You know, why are you doing that? Nothing good ever happened to us there." And yet, I always felt, because of the number of relatives I had on my maternal side when I grew up, that that life, the time they spent there, and where my grandfather came from, and where my grandmother came from, that those things were very palpable to me and very important. On the other hand, on the other hand, history is a difficult thing. Atavio Paz said, "To fight evil is to fight ourselves, and that is the meaning of history. That is something that Europeans understand. That is something that Americans do not understand. The sins of the past, such as the Holocaust, will not be redressed. There's no redressing of those things. Europeans understand that. Americans do not understand. Americans think that the future will be determined by things that we will do right now, as opposed to the germ of violence that is within us still, after all this time. So to go back to your first question about response to the poetry, the poetry is in love with the instant. Poetry is in love with the instant. That's another thing that Paz said. And the instant is a complex thing. What is going on right now, we cannot analyze. We can only dive in. So the moment you go back to that place of history, to that town in France, it's about bringing your whole self to that moment and seeing what will happen. And that, I think, is something that is a matter of temperament that I think has been difficult for perhaps an entire generation before me. I think that the unexpressed leads to all kinds of problems. And I think that all Freud wanted to do was to convert our psychoses and neuroses into garden variety unhappiness, you know? And to somehow be able to incorporate that unhappiness into a gratifying way of living, to make your unhappiness gratifying. And I think that there is a lot of unhappiness in poetry. The poem I just read really seems to have misgivings, seems to be melancholy, seems to be appreciative, seems to be this, seems to be that. Seems to still be yearning for the past, seems to want to reject the past. Everything occurs in the moment, all at the same time. And, you know, that's why perhaps poetry and why these sprung forms of fiction can be so much more stimulating and real and actual than conventional forms of writing. I believe you with that. Ron Slate, thank you so much for coming on "The Virtual Memory Show." It's been my pleasure, Gil. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that was Ron Slate. I really enjoyed his poetry. And after the conversation, we talked a bit more about the contrast between the first and second books. And he really helped elucidate what it was that I dug particularly about the first book, "The Incentive of the Maggot." If you're wondering, it's compression and line length. And he really nails that in the first book. And some of the poems in the second book stretch on a bit in a way that I think he thinks could be improved. You should check out both books, "The Incentive of the Maggot and the Great Wave." Also, you need to go to Ron's site on the seawall at Ron Slate.com. That's R-O-N-S-L-A-T-E. It's got his book reviews, some new poems he's working on, and other writings. Most recently, he included a fun survey of, well, 30 writers talking about what they plan to read this summer. Also, I should mention, one of Ron's daughters, he has three daughters, one of them is Jenny Slate, an actress and comedian who has a new movie out called "The Obvious Child." I haven't seen it yet, but the trailers look great. And I've loved Jenny's work since I first saw her on board to death, and she became a scene stealer in "Parks and Rec" as Mona Lisa. I forget her last name, but trust me, if you've seen "Parks and Rec" and this character popping up, you'll know exactly who she is. I'm hoping to get her on the show at some point, too. Ron Swears, she's a really fun book conversation. So we'll see how that goes. But that is it for this week's "Virtual Memories" show. I'll be back next Tuesday with my guest, Ron Rosenbaum, who I mentioned earlier, about the re-release of his book "Explaining Hitler." It's, well, it's as fun a conversation as you can have about Hitler and the nature of evil and the hatred of Jews. And trust me, it's a good one. You'll need to come back for it. In the meantime, please, hit up our websites, vmspod.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm, to make a donation to this ad-free podcast. Things like that reader constrip, the hotel stay meals, all that stuff. It all really does pile up, although I am now finally getting a paycheck from my new job. So if you'd like to help out, I would appreciate it. You can make a donation at either of the sites. You can also find past episodes there and get on our weekly email list, where I send you news about the new episode, as well as books, articles, and other things that are going on with past guests. And speaking of guests, if you have ideas for any people I should talk to, someone you think is interesting or has a new book out who'd be a good conversationalist, drop me a line at Groth, G-R-O-T-H, at chimeraobscura.com. Or reach out to me at vmspod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And do me a favor, go to the iTunes store, look up the virtual memory show, and leave a review and a rating. More people do that, better the chances we'll get featured when people search for poetry by biotech executives. Until next time, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]