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Michael Klein is living proof that real poets are born not made. Big-voiced, big-hearted, and utterly wild, Klein transforms a room when he enters it, injecting a kind of liberating madness, an exuberance that challenges others to be larger, more original, and free than they already are (this is what real poets do for the rest of us). "Risk is extra life," wrote Klein, 59, in one of his poems, and risk has been his credo, indeed, in the award-winning books that have earned him a formidable literary reputation as well as the love of his writing students. “Surprise yourselves!” he is fond of saying. "Otherwise, you won’t be worth reading.” In life and work, Klein always surprises. The Talking Day, his most recent book of poems, is a both a Lambda Literary Award and a Thom Gunn Award Finalist this year. Klein has also written two memoirs: Track Conditions (Lambda Literary Award Finalist) and The End of Being Known, as well as another collection of poems, then, we were still living. He teaches in the MFA Progran at Goddard College and lives in New York City and Provincetown. Klein spoke to me recently about the role of courage in powerful writing and why it is never okay to be boring
MM: How do you work with students who can’t write?
MK: I really turn them onto reading, that’s the first thing I do. It’s actually the thing I do with everybody. Many people who come to writing as a student haven’t really read a lot. So the first thing I do is try to get them excited about reading. Not necessarily about what books are about but the actual pleasure of what reading is and what deep reading is; what you read below the surface of a text. So, I do that and then I sort of mix it up. I ask them to write reviews, of a movie, or something they really like. I never put any rules on what it has to be. I just say, what do you see? What keeps you up at night? What are you really passionate about (if it’s another art form)? Again, it doesn’t have to be books necessarily. But just write what you feel. And the other thing I do a lot of time is use the ‘I remember’ exercise.
MM: Tell me about that.
MK: Joe Brainard wrote this really famous book—he actually calls it a memoir, in which every sentence in the book starts with the words I remember. You know the book, right?
MM: I’ve never used that with students.
MK: I use that all the time. He starts sentences with the words “I remember”,but they’re really specific memories. They’re not like “I remember the first time Mark told me he loved me” or “I remember running away from home.” They’re very, very specific—like, “I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.” I remember sentences can be about an emotional situation, but it could also be about a thing. It could be really descriptive about something. When I encounter poets who haven’t really found their voice yet, I try to enforce the idea of the image and I try to enforce the idea of having an original idea. You have to have an original idea about something or it’s not worth writing about. You have to know something about living that nobody else has thought about. It could be anything – your idea about the rain. It could be tiny, like apricot pie. But it has to be different and startling in some way. And it has to have the force of forward motion—and I’m not talking about narrative, necessarily. I guess I’m talking about energy. It has to have energy.
MM: And when they hook into that original idea—does it help them hook into an original way of writing?
MK: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Because a lot of times the original idea is something they didn’t think of as theirs, necessarily. Probably more often than not, it’s something they’ve never revealed. One of the exercises that I’ve used in order to find out what the original idea is, is to write something that you thought was true that you find out over time, isn’t. Usually they go back to childhood. Like Santa Claus being a real person—to have a myth sort of quashed at some point later in life and to write about that feeling. What was that like? I always try to give exercises where the results will be something that will surprise them and a lot of times when people are in that mode they write differently. They write better when it’s harder – which, of course, it should always be. For instance, I’m writing a lot of criticism these days and I really enjoy it because I’m not as good at it as I want to be. It’s hard for me, so it holds my interest in many ways more than poetry does. When something that you’re writing actually surprises you, you tend to get out of your own way.
MM: What about dos and don’ts for writing students? Let’s start with the don’ts.
MK: Okay. Don’t work on a computer in which you can access the Internet, which I think is really important. And don’t judge your own work. Don’t go with the first version. Don’t use dialogue unless it moves the story forward and you have a really good ear for how different people talk. Don’t talk about the natural world or the human body when you get stuck. Don’t use a long word when you can use a short word. And rule number one: Don’t be boring.
MM: What about showing work to people?
MK: I’m not a fan of that. A lot of people feel that it’s important to do so I’m not going to say don’t. I would probably say do show it to people. But I would say don’t ever show somebody work that isn’t finished. And don’t seek publication until it feels absolutely natural. Publication is not the same thing as writing. I think that’s a really important thing to understand.
MM: What about the dos?
MK: Do read constantly. Do subscribe to journals, literary journals. Do go to readings. Do go to everything—movies, theater, dance, museums—do everything that has some artistic merit behind it. Do read criticism. Do familiarize yourself with all the online publications. Do revise.
MM: I was just going to ask you about revision.
MK: That’s what it is. Do revise, revise, revise. That’s what writing is. And what living is, too—isn’t it. Re-Vision. Real subject matter can have a really strange way of finding you. So, you have to be really open to where the writing takes you and not where you take the writing. Do let whatever happens, happen in the first draft. It’s only in revision that I know what I’ve written. Every first draft feels like I don’t know anything about writing. Why am I even doing this? It feels like I’m a fraud. It’s only until about the third or fourth go round that I actually see something emerges—and the thing that emerges is the intention, of course, but it’s also the discovery of language. The other thing about revision is that I move things around constantly and I always suggest this to students. Writing is fluid. Maybe start whatever you have written with the end instead of the beginning.
MM: So tell me, what does teaching give you that writing doesn’t? What do you learn from it?
MK: Teaching gives me a community and puts me in a world of action. Writing—aside from being a solitary art—is extremely ephemeral, isn’t it? When I’m teaching, there’s a responsibility I think to let people know that they’re part of a much bigger dialogue that goes beyond themselves—that they aren’t just writing for themselves. Sometimes, when people say, for instance, that they want to write a memoir I tell them, it better be special! Patricia Hampl said, “you get no credit for living.” What is the event? What was the point in the road where you realized that there was no turning back? There has to be a watershed moment—a reckoning of some kind.
MM: They have to find the story behind the situation..
MK: Exactly. And it could be anything. It could be getting pregnant at fourteen. If it was that—tell that story in a way that’s never been told before. With the cast of characters. What did you sacrifice? What didn’t you sacrifice? How did you get pregnant? Why? It’s so interesting to me that memoir is the thing that everybody seems to want to write. And it goes back, I think, to the idea that you do get credit for living. But we secretly know, you don’t.
MM: What are the particular challenges of teaching memoir?
MK: Patricia Hampl, again, said that memoir is the story of somebody’s mind. Which is what Joan Didion does, isn’t it? The most exciting memoirs are the ones where you can hear and feel the person thinking and telling the story. And it’s important, I think, not to write out of revenge. You could be writing out of anger, but there has to be a place in which your feeling about what you’re writing about doesn’t influence the writing. That you’ve been able to see your own story objectively and instilled it with a sense of forgiveness—whether it’s literal or not; a sense that you are seeing people fairly in addition to who they really are. You also have to explain how your watershed moment changed you; changed your life. Too many people, when they approach the memoir, are initially afraid of who they’re going to hurt in their story. And I think, if you’re really going to hurt somebody, it’s probably not worth it. Somebody—understandably—will probably get upset (both my sister and my father were angry with me after my memoir came out), but that has more to do, I think, with the fact that somebody in the family told. Tobias Wolfe has this great quote about how nobody can criticize you for the way you remember something. That’s the real key I think. The last thing you need, particularly in writing memoir is to be self-censoring. You just can’t do that or you’ll never write anything that anybody can read.
MM: I tell people to be reckless, shameless, and naked in the first draft.
MK: Yeah. Tell your dirtiest little secrets. The first assignment I used to give when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence was, write something you can’t show your parents. Get it out of the way. Then, from there, it gets exciting; then, you’re in the danger zone and anything can happen. A lot of people aren’t built to write a memoir. I don’t think it’s something that you should just do casually because you don’t want to write poetry or fiction and everybody has a life so you can just write about that. And sometimes people fall into this lazy kind of journal writing and I tell them to get away from that because, again, there’s a tendency to move towards boredom. Even if you had a boring life, there has to be something that happened to you that wasn’t boring. Or that you thought about something that was not boring. Maybe you had an imaginary friend who was living the life you were afraid to live. You can’t write about just growing up in Baltimore. It has to be something no one’s said before and that somebody’s going to be interested in on some level. And that’s all I do when I write memoir. I don’t think I could tell a plain story to save my life.
MM: It’s not your style.
MK: When I’m writing an essay or a memoir I think that I am holding something dear, in a way. Even if it was horrible, I’m holding it close. There’s something sacred about it. I think, at its best, there is a kind of sacred quality to the form. I’m thinking, in particular, of Sarah Manguso’s extraordinary “The Guardians” and Karen Green’s gorgeous elegy to her husband, David Foster Wallace, “Bough Down”. Grief, in particular brings us really up close to the sacred.
MM: Last question. What are you working on now?
MK: Lots of critical essays and reviews. I have a long piece coming outin Poetry magazine in the summer and I’m working on a book called “A Life in the Theater”—prose poems, mostly, about the theater and other things. I go to the theater all the time but I never bring it into anything that I write and I wanted to start doing that. So, I started writing these little prose poems about either what happens on a stage or what I’m thinking of when I’m watching a play or if I have a personal connection. I used to live in the same building as Joel Grey and Shelly Winters and there have been actors and theater people around me my whole life.
