Ben Mirov on writin’ poems and his new chap, Vortexts!

I saw Ben Mirov read a few months back in Brooklyn and it was awesome. He was making quite a ruckus: blasting out poem after poem chock full of  epic smooches, ghosts and beyond. This is a brief interview we did about his new chapbook, Vortexts, which was put out quite recently by Supermachine. Onward!

MLR:

There are many literary figures who pop up in your book, kinda like the new Woody Allen movie. ( : Robert Frost, James Tate, Doestoevsky, etc…Can you talk a little bit about them? Why they’re there? How they are important to Vortexts?

BM:

The names just started coming up in my poems. There’s no real connection between them, except that they are all writers, I think. I started including names in my work because I thought it was funny. But I also like the way a person’s name has a plastic quality to it. Like you can take it and all it’s potential associations and you have a prefabricated character for your poem. I also like the idea that someone’s public persona can add ambiguity to a poem. Someone might conceive their own reason why I put Robert Frost in a poem that has no connection to my original impulse. So in that sense, I hope the names are generative nuances.

MLR:

There are many ghosts and souls flying around Vortexts. I feel like there’s also an undercurrent of loss and death in this chap. (Maybe I just think this because I have been obsessed with death ever since I turned the ripe old age of 28. ) What do you think you’re exploring with your ghosts? Are you thinking about loss and death as you write poems?

BM:

I don’t really think about anything when I’m writing poems. It’s not like I go into a poem thinking “Now I’m going to write about death”. But I do believe most poets carry around a set of values in their head that guide their writing. I value death, in the sense that I think about it and its consequences most days of my life. So going into a poem my brain already has a strong impetus to meditate on death as a potential topic for a poem.

In that sense, there are ghosts inhabiting all my poems. I think, for a lot of people, writing is about being inhabited by impulses. Something gets inside you and gestates until it has a chance to manifest itself as a poem. As a poet, the job is to allowing the “ghost” to manifest itself as fully and precisely as possible.

Also, to be clear, I don’t believe in ghosts in the haunted house sense. I think the ghosts in writing are practical ghosts. They’re bound to us by science and biology. There’s no question that we experience reality and record it with our brain and that we manifest our experience through behavior, especially through the production of material forms.

MLR:

What is your favorite poem in Vortexts and why?

BM:

Good question. I’ve never thought about that. Probably “A Kiss on the Purplish Light”. That one came together pretty quickly and I’ve never really messed with it once it was written. Also, it’s one of my favorite poems to read. I’ve read it to audiences a bunch and every time, I feel excited to read it.

MLR:

I really like this from your chapbook:

In the not-so-distant future

the poems are dressed in nothing

like diamonds and there are only

a handful. They stand in some kind

of formation we don’t understand…

One way I read this is that you’re wishing for/predicting the death of heavily veiled or obscured meaning/feeling in poems; that poetry will be accessible and sparse and simultaneously mysterious. How does that sound to you?

BM:

I really like what you said about wishing for the death of “obscured meaning/feeling in poems,” I never thought about that with reference to the line you mentioned. I think writing clear lines is a definite value of mine. One of the reasons I love image over exposition is that an image can attain a lapidary quality that seems more articulate and ambiguous than exposition or rhetoric. You can make an image that is both accurate and mysterious. In fact, in my experience, the two qualities are often interdependent and catalyze each other.

I don’t think poetry should be any one way, so I don’t want to say I was “wishing” for any particular type of writing to die. I don’t even want bad writing to go away because even it is useful. Drawing lines of definition between poetic categories or having a kind of conservative idea of poetry has never been a useful tool to me. So I don’t want to proffer any type of didactic stance, but I do love productive ambiguities in poetry. Things like well-crafted lines, images, accurate grammar and punctuation, are all proper infrastructure for a poem to create mystery or emotion or whatever. But I don’t like to think of them beyond their function within a poem I’ve written. I never assume what type of response, if any, a poem will evoke in a reader. I just try to think about the pieces of the machine and how they fit together.

MLR:

Can you talk a little bit about this chapbook’s process? You mentioned you don’t approach poetry with specific intentions in terms of subject or message, but did you think of this manuscript in any type of overarching way? Do certain projects you work on focus on different “sets of values?” Do they shift?

BM: