DN: It reminds me of the fellowship with the pestle again, in a way. If you submit to a form, you’re also entering a conversation with a history around the form as well.
UKL: There is that, yes, and that’s exciting, although you can’t think of it while you’re writing, because that would be scary.
DN: You said in your Paris Review interview that, in fiction writing, you could also look at genre as a form, that sometimes by choosing to adopt a form in fiction, you will also discover things that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
UKL: Absolutely. I think anybody who tries to write in genre seriously, who isn’t just using it because it’s chic at the moment or they think they could do better than hack writers, they find that “Oh, I have to do it this way, so how do I do that?” There’s a sort of commitment there that makes you take it seriously. It opens up evidence to you that you would not have thought of by yourself, that the form hands over to you. But again, it’s hard to describe.
DN: I’m curious about the absence or the relative absence of science fiction and fantasy in your poetry…
UKL: I can’t put them together. There is a Science Fiction Poetry Association, and some poets that I grew up with, like Tennyson, were very good at doing a kind of science fictional poetry or putting science into their poetry. My mind apparently won’t come together there. They’re different businesses to me.
DN: In the afterword to Late in the Day, you talk about free form and free verse and how you do both. Can you talk more about free form? You mention Gerard Manley Hopkins as an example of someone taking a given form but altering it.
UKL: If you are a great enough poet you can make a curtal sonnet out of the sonnet. Sometimes I wonder about Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ve never understood his sprung rhythm. I’ve tried and tried and tried. It doesn’t make sense to me and I’m not quite sure that a curtal sonnet is a sonnet, but it’s a lovely form. That was one of our assignments in my poetry group. I had to write one. I was terrified. [Both laugh.]
DN: I looked up the definition of a curtal sonnet and was quickly lost in the terminology of it. It is an eleven-line poem, but it consists precisely of three-fourths of the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet shrunk proportionally.
UKL: Yes. [Both laugh.] That’s kind of a complex way of doing it, but yeah, and it has this very strange short last line. The rhyming is fairly complex, and that description didn’t say that it’s also broken into six lines and then five lines. There is a break, and that is similar to the classic sonnet, which has that turning in the middle.
DN: When you received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, you gave both a beautiful and blistering speech about the commodification of art versus the practice of art. A speech that became an immediate viral sensation.
UKL: That was my fifteen minutes, my whole fifteen minutes. That was so amazing, when I woke up the next morning.
DN: You end Late in the Day with a transcript of this speech. In it you say that resistance and change often begin in art, and that most often it is in the art of words that you see the beginnings of resistance and change.
UKL: After all, dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom poets are not political beings, but it doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.
ON NONFICTION
Over the past decade, it is in-the-world Ursula, as public figure and public thinker that has risen to prominence. During that time, she publicly resigned from the Authors Guild to protest the settlement with Google that allowed them to digitize books in disregard of copyright. She also gave what is widely regarded as the most ferocious speech in National Book Foundation history, using her acceptance of the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to lambast the deepening corporatization and commodification of books and their authors by the likes of Amazon. She has become an important part of the national conversation on many issues of the day, from the meaning of facts in the so-called postfactual era, to the meaning of “public lands” at a time when a wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon was occupied by a militia in order to “liberate” such lands from the government. It is also during this time that Ursula has opened up about her early struggles as a writer, offered advice on writing in a website forum, and given us a different look into her life with the serial publication of her cat Pard’s “memoirs” on her blog.
It seemed fitting, then, for our third conversation, one about writing nonfiction, that we met not at the radio station, but at her home. Erin, the PM news coordinator at KBOO, someone who coincidentally was helping with a documentary being filmed on Ursula’s life and career, volunteered to serve as sound engineer for our conversation. I traveled there with Erin, and we set up in a cozy book-filled space on the upper floor of the house where the sound quality would be at its best for a field recording. Nevertheless, the outside world still intervened. We paused as a truck rumbled by on a nearby street, or to greet Pard, who wanted to check out what all the fuss was about before returning to his favored spot on the bed in a nearby bedroom.
You’ll discover, as I did, that Ursula feels most at home in fiction and poetry, more uneasy in the world of declaration and assertion. In her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, she writes, “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” And yet, in her essay collections, her literary criticism, her speeches—this arena where she delivers her views on things—whether about science and the environment, Google and Amazon, or feminism and the canon, she seems to do so in defense of the voiceless and in the spirit of the unanswerable inside every artist, every person.
At the end of this nonfiction conversation, I mentioned how rare it is to be able to talk with someone with such a deep history in all three genres—fiction, poetry, nonfiction. How unique this journey had been. In fact, I couldn’t imagine who else I could’ve done this with. “Maybe we should make this into a book!” Ursula answered. And here we are, her musing has become our reality, an object out in the world, held open in our hands.
DAVID NAIMON: This is our third conversation about your writing, the first two times at the radio station and this time here at your house. Given that we’ve talked about both fiction and poetry, when Small Beer Press announced its release of your collection of nonfiction, it seemed only natural to complete the circle, the circle of genres, to meet again, to talk about the art of the essay, and the art of literary criticism. It’s interesting, however, that when a reader opens Words Are My Matter for the first time, the first thing they will encounter is a poem followed by the first sentence of the foreword, where you say: “I seldom have as much pleasure in reading nonfiction as I do a poem or a story.” Can you elaborate on why that is? And why you open the book with an interrogation of your interest, or lack of interest, in nonfiction?