An Interview with Andrew Hudgins


Andrew Hudgins is the author of seven books of poetry, including the recent Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children. Born in Texas and raised on various military bases throughout the American South, he is a writer whose interests, while rooted in the South, take him well beyond his place of origin. Often described as a formalist, his work employs a variety of poetic technologies in service to his wide-ranging interests and insights. There is also a strong narrative strain in his poetry, which finds expression not just in individual poems but in book-length sequences such as After the Lost War, a historical narrative based on the life of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier; and The Glass Hammer: a Southern Childhood. His awards include the Witter Bynner Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has taught at Baylor University and University of Cincinnati; he is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State University.

Interviewer: Lee Rossi

 
LR: Your new book is entitled Shut Up, You’re Fine, which seems a provocation to the normally genial and gentle reader of poetry. Your earlier work often has a provocative quality, but this book delights in its untrammeled flaunting of convention. What you’ve produced, I think, is a volume of raucous and unfettered satire. Who or what are the main targets of your satire?

AH: “Shut up, you’re fine!” is what some parents, say mine, tell a kid after they’ve slapped him. It’s a peculiar statement, one that I had plenty of time to meditate on while crying and then trying not to cry after being ordered, “Shut up or I’ll give you something real to cry about.” Or “If you don’t shut up, you’ll get another dose—and harder too.” Or “If you don’t stop your sniveling, there’s more where that came from.”

The weirdest and most interesting of all is this counsel from my father, almost Zen-like in its philosophy: “You’re not hurt. You just think you are.”

But as I sniffled and sniveled, I thought about “Shut up, you’re fine.” First, I wasn’t fine. That was the point of hitting me—to punish me, to make me un-fine. What did my parents expect a struck child to do, burst into the chorus of “They Call the Wind Maria?” In fact, if didn’t cry after being hit, I was sometimes smacked again to make sure I’d received the message. But of course the last thing a parent wants is an ululating reminder that he’s lost his temper and struck someone he loves, so he suspects, often rightly, that his beloved child is responding histrionically to the blow in order to exacerbate his parents’ guilt and help them stay their backhands the next time he provokes them. So “Shut Up, You’re Fine” is, to my mind, both cruel and very funny in its internal contradictions.

The title gives readers a clear sense of what the book is about, I think, even if they don’t get all the echoes I hear in the phrase—and they get the playfulness behind the faux aggression. 

LR: You call your book “Poems for Very, Very Bad Children,” suggesting that you want the reader to recall the charming insipidness of R.L. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses or possibly even Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Are these Songs of Experience for the Zeros?

AH: I’d wanted to subtitle the book “Troubling Poems for Troubling Children,” but the big box bookstores nixed that as too likely to attract actual children. So we came up with a title that seems to me much more likely to attract actual children. Go figure.

I’d never really thought about Blake in terms of these poems, though I should have. In an essay on Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, John Hollander argues that most poets love the book, as it is often their first experience of poetry. I don’t believe I read the book as a child, though I stumbled across some of the poems in anthologies and textbooks, or had them read to me by teachers. I hated them. I thought they were insipid, dishonest, and facile. Now I can find a bit of the charm in them, but as a kid I was contemptuous of how they sentimentalized childhood and rubbed my nose in an idealized and impossible childhood nothing like mine, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s for that matter. At the same time that I was reading Hollander’s essay and trying to educate myself on the virtues of poems I’d so long despised, a joke list popped up on my computer. It was something like “Children’s Books That Will Never Be Written: The Little Sissy Who Snitched, Strangers Have the Best Candy, Why Mr. Fork and Miss Electrical Outlet Can Never Be Friends, and, my favorite, Daddy Drinks Because You Cry.” It occurred to me that it might be possible to bring the form of Stevenson’s poems to that sensibility, one more consonant with my view of life. 

LR: You’re probably not the first poet to adopt the persona of an unruly child in order to skewer the hypocrisy of social convention. Did you have particular authors in mind when you began the book? How was the book conceived, and what were the stages in its gestation?

AH: With the first four or five poems, no, I didn’t really have any models in mind other than those I just mentioned. Maybe Edward Gorey, whose wonderful The Gashlycrumb Tinies I knew because when I was a grad student at Iowa one of my undergrads in a sophomore class give me a poster of it. I’d read Shock-headed Peter, but remember it so vaguely I couldn’t tell you where or when. Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc were in the deeper recesses of my mind when I started, but I did reread them during the eight years I was pecking away at these poems. There are also the zillions of children’s books, now undifferentiated in memory, that I read when I was a kid. And for awhile I was enchanted with Rug Rats, Beavis and Butthead, Malcolm in the Middle, and South Park.  

LR: One thing I especially like about the book is that it is an Equal Opportunity Offender. No one seems to escape its lash, right wing or left, upper class or lower (although the lumpen come in for more than their share of lumps), pacifists, vegetarians, hunters, animal rights activists, and even people with lisps. Your personae are not empathetic, insightful, tender, modest, or any of those things that writers, especially poets, ordinarily try to be. Conversely, the speakers of these poems are superficial, irritable, prurient, greedy, all id and no superego, exemplars of a great variety of sins, whether they be deadly or merely maiming. How much fun was that, and how would you respond to those who would accuse the book of sponsoring ill will toward the poor, downtrodden, and otherwise underprivileged?

AH: Doesn’t everyone like to piss on the poor, downtrodden and underprivileged? That’s what they’re for—to reassure us that we are the pissers and not the pissees. Though—because!—mutatis mutandis, we are. Seriously, I did try to take on as broad a spectrum as I could imagine. In my mind, most of these kids are middle class, though some are toward the bottom of the middle. A few are poor.  The lives of the wealthy are both thoroughly alien to me and thoroughly worked over as subject matter. I’d love to give some more good hard whacks at the toffs, and Biffs and Buffys of the world, if I can find a way to do it entertainingly. In writing about the heedless wealthy, there’s a tendency to let rage knock humor out of the driver’s seat.  

The poem about the lisping boy probably will be seen by some readers as a jab at kids with speech impediments, maybe rightly, and I’m sorry about that. I just see him as a kid who lisps. As a child and then again briefly as an adult, during a stressful couple of weeks, I was a stutterer. I kind of liked the sensual pleasure of it, the concentration that speaking suddenly required and the exaggerated physicality of it—because I knew it was a transient nervous tic. In the poem, I was enjoying the boy’s theatricality and obliviousness to his words’ effect on the girl, as well as the technical pleasures to indicating the lisped words while making the meaning clear, which is itself, I think, funny. It’s not just that he’s lisping, it’s that he’s lisping about genitalia!  

Other poets have celebrated the innocence of children, but these poems look at a side that’s at least equally true. For instance, from almost as early as I can remember, I was terrified that my father would die. I was very, very aware that he was in the military, which meant he could be called into action and killed—and that led me to think how easily he could be killed in a car accident or from some dread disease. If he died, we would be poor. My mother would have to get a job, and since I was the oldest, I’d have to get one too as soon as I was old enough. We might have to go live in my grandmother’s shotgun shack in rural Georgia. So when I prayed, as I did every night, that my father stay healthy, I was praying out of love, sure, but also out of a terror driven by pure revolting self-interest. I suffered immense guilt for that. But over time I came to see the conflation of self-interest and guilt as a child’s form of clarity—and that contradiction is, to me, funny. I imagine most people have come to analogous understandings.

If there’s humor in the poems, some of it comes from clashing these poems up against the expectation that children are romantic innocents trailing clouds of glory and not shit-dipped Pampers. And the persistent conception that poetry is, in its essence, an ennobling art, which it can be, would send Martial, Chaucer, Swift, and Wendy Cope, and any number of other poets into fits of choking laughter. W.H. Auden wrote:

“As poets have most mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The screamingly funny,
The rolling in money,
And those who are very well hung.”

Humor is a complex and often dirty business. As the ancient playwrights knew, everything depends on where the Wheel of Fortune stops, or more accurately, pauses, hesitates, or trembles, before it starts spinning again. Emerson: “Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary.” Or as my friend Danny Anderson says in a poem: “It’s always funny till somebody gets hurt./And then it’s really funny.”

For instance: At your party, your buddy Jim is walking across the backyard toward your table, carrying eight mugs of beer, four in each hand, and he’s doing a little dance, a bit of a jig, to show you he’s sober, that he can handle it. But he trips.

Funny.

You run over, but Jim’s not moving. He just lies there as you call, “Jim! Jim! Are you all right, dude?”

Not funny.

You keep calling his name more and more frantically, and just as you draw back your hand to slap him—anything to bring him around!—he sits up and laughs. Fooled you. You laugh too, reluctantly, though you’d rather punch him right in his laughing goddamn mouth.

Funny. For him. And for your friends back at the table. Yeah, big whoop. Everybody’s having a good time.

Then Jim’s eyes go vague, and he slouches back onto the grass you mowed that afternoon. You stand up, get a beer, and step over Jim on the way back to your table. You think that’s funny, stepping over him, but no one laughs. Does Jim, that asshole, think you’ll fall for it twice? But even after you get back to your table and start talking to your other friends, Jim doesn’t move. You’ll be damned if you’re going to go back over and check him out. Once was more than enough. But when Bobby, a paramedic, does go over, Jim’s pulse is weak and thready.

Not funny.

At the hospital the next day, sitting up watching the Bears versus the Patriots on the black-and-white TV bolted to the wall, Jim tells you he suffered a concussion. He’ll have to take it easy for a month or so, but he’s okay. Really, he’s fine. About midway through the third quarter, Patriots up by 21, everybody has a good laugh about yesterday and the way misunderstandings got out of hand.

Funny.

The next morning, Bobby calls. In the hospital, a little after 2 AM, Jim tossed an aneurism. The widow has asked Bobby and you to be casket bearers.

Not so fucking funny.

As you near the grave, Bobby, who’d been nipping at his flask and offered you a snort of whisky (you took a quick lip-smacking jolt, just to be courteous), stumbles. His knee dips right into the back of your left knee, the one near the casket. As you start to fall, you pull the coffin down with you, but from your knees, you brace yourself and push it back upright. The casket lid swings open, and Jim sort of stands there for a moment, wobbling, before he crumbles to the ground.

Funny?

In the silence before anyone can move, the widow faints, landing on her back beside Jim. 

Not funny. Not now. But in twenty years, when you’ve had a few beers and you’re telling the story to people who weren’t even born when it happened, maybe. Or maybe not.

As everyone rushes to the widow, you stand stupidly still, remembering the party the other day. Maybe she’s just pretending to be unconscious. She has the same sense of humor as that goddamn Jim. Then you realize that everyone can smell the Early Times on your breath. Because you are kneeling there with your mouth hanging open and that glazed-idiot look on your face, they think you’re drunk.

Funny. Not funny. Yes. Nietzsche: “Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.”

To paraphrase Emerson, we could keep going.

Later that night, sometime between eleven and midnight, from a bar called the Do Drop Lounge, you call the widow to explain that, though you are drunk now, you weren’t drunk at the funeral.

“Brenda, this is Lee. Lee Rossi?”

In the background, music is playing, and after a second, you get it. It’s The Captain and Tennille singing “Muskrat Love.” Brenda doesn’t say a word, just breathes into the receiver, while you hear an entire verse. Damn, this piece-of-crap song is going to be in my head for a month, you think:

“Nibbling on bacon, chewin’ on cheese
Sammy says to Susie, Honey, would you please be my missus?
And she says yes
With her kisses.”

Brenda seems to be listening to the song too, because she waits till the verse is over before she says, “Lee….

LR: The poems in Shut Up, You’re Fine normally display a conversational, colloquial diction. There are even some, I suspect, made-up words like “Gedoinkers” (one of many terms for grandma’s breasts) which sound like slang. Occasionally, however, a speaker will advert to the fact that he’s read some literature. I’m thinking, for example, of the last stanza in the book (from “Sleep, Sleep”), in which the speaker, who seems older than some of the others and who has been meditating on the value of sleep as an escape from the horrors of the everyday, concludes:

Sleep, sleep—
the costs are steep.
Sell blow, get rich, and move away
to hushed and far Far Rockaway.

Now maybe it’s me, but I seem to hear a rueful, elegiac beat there as well as an echo of Hart Crane. Can you talk about how you manage tone in these poems?

AH: Sleep that knits the raveled sleeve of urban decay? I hadn’t thought of Crane in that poem, but now that you say it, I see what you mean. He could very well be in back of the poem; I was rereading him and a couple of bios and studies of him while I was working on this book. Here the elegiac, almost pastoral tone, contrasts with the gritty urban scene in a way I found amusing. Tone is always the problem with humor, isn’t it? The wrong word or wrong casting of perspective can make humor merely mean, and since tone depends as much on the tuning of the listener’s ear as the intention of the speaker, jokes gang aft a-gley.

LR: One marvels at the formal ease and inventiveness of the poems. There are quatrains, couplets, terza rima, and even a few nonce forms. Why did you choose traditional and elaborate forms for such unruly subjects?

AH: Without the strictures of rhyme and meter, my humor wanted to slip into stand-up routines or humorous essays. I admire both of those forms very much, but for these poems I wanted the conciseness of poetry and the pop of comic verse. As you say, the tension between form and subject is what makes the poems fun to write and also what drives their humor. But I didn’t start out with such a clear idea of what I was doing. Mark Jarman liked the first couple of one-off humorous poems I wrote, so I wrote more, but loosely, using slant rhymes, which I love too much, and both the looser or more compacted rhythms that are appropriate for a lot of serious work. But for humor, the rhymes have to be exact—or if inexact, they have to be inexact for a good and humorous purpose. Josh Mehigan, who is a wonderful poet, was immensely helpful both with encouragement and in kicking me repeatedly in the head until I saw what I needed to see about making these poems work in traditional form with predictable rhythms and precise rhymes. And so did Dan Groves and Jim Cummins, both superb poets. The poems took a lot of time and tinkering. But it was fun tinkering. Serious poems make brutal demands on the emotions and the desire to get the expression exactly right—exact and transcendent, say, at the same time. With these poems, as I worked on them, they just had to get funnier as I worked on them. The latter is like making a toaster, the former like making an Arabian stallion.

LR: Most of the speakers of the poems seem to be boys, but occasionally one hears a female voice, as in “My Sister’s Stash.” Why so few girls? Aren’t there as many bad girls as bad boys?

AH: I was a boy raised in a house with three brothers. I know boys from the inside out and girls only from the outside. (There’s a joke floating in that sentence, but I will leave it unformed.) That I failed to include more girls is simply a failure of artistic imagination.

LR: You’ve now published seven volumes of poetry, four of which have been somewhat miscellaneous collections in a variety of forms and voices. The others have been more sustained efforts, for example, your autobiographical series The Glass Hammer and the historical sequence about Sidney Lanier, After the Lost War. I would also include Shut Up, You’re Fine in this latter group because of its consistency of style and subject matter. What draws you to such longer efforts and how much more difficult is it to complete a book-length series as opposed to writing individual poems?

AH: None of the projects began as projects. They all started as a poem or two that drew me back to them. I wrote a few more and then a few more, and the idea of the whole started to take on mass and velocity. One advantage of projects is that after awhile they start to sustain themselves. Your mind becomes attuned to thinking the way the book requires. Everything you read, see, and hear begins to feed into the writing of it. On the flip side, the project can become oppressive for the same reasons. It takes over your life and limits what you can see and do. And when the velocity of the writing stalls, it can take a lot of work, effort, and induced psychosis to get it moving again. 

LR: I understand that your New and Selected Poems is coming out soon. What was your process in putting it together? Did you find yourself liking particular pieces more or less than you expected? How is the final result weighted in terms of early, middle, and late?

AH: Michael Collier, a terrific and thoughtful editor, suggested that I come up with a proposed table of contents, and he, independently, would come up with his own list. It’s astoundingly generous for anyone to immerse himself that deeply in someone else’s writing, and then to make hard inclusionary and exclusionary decisions about it. It’s just a ton of work to take on, and Michael was extraordinarily helpful. Mostly we agreed on the poems to include. When we didn’t, there was some very useful give and take. We tried to represent each book more of less equally. I wasn’t sure at first that I wanted to include anything from After the Lost War, figuring it’s a stand-alone book. When I did select from it, I over-structured the poems to focus on Lanier’s relationship with his wife. Michael’s suggestions helped me broaden the representation of the book to give a richer, more accurate sense of the whole. And Michael encouraged me to include more poems from The Glass Hammer. When I looked at the book more closely, I saw the virtues of a work that I had grown wary of just because I’m wary of autobiography in general.

I hadn’t wanted to do a New and Selected because I don’t like to look back at my writing. I like to think I’m concentrating on what I’m doing right now and what I’ll be doing tomorrow. But now that I’ve sat down and looked at the old work from beginning to end, I’ve found it helpful in clearing my head for new writing.

LR: Well, whatever the new writing turns out to be, I’m sure it’ll be compelling and challenging. And thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us.

AH: Lee, it is always a pleasure to talk to you, and I appreciate your thoughtful questions.