"Capital-D Death": An Interview with Ross White

Ross White is the editor of Inch, a magazine of short poetry and microfiction, and the publisher of Bull City Press (http://bullcitypress.com). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Poetry Daily, BOXCAR Poetry Review, and Meridian, among others. Ross is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a co-founder of The Hinge Literary Center, which serves writers in North Carolina.

White's poem "Death, I Wish You" appears in Issue Twenty-Eight of The Collagist.  Here, he speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about his work.

1. Was “Death, I Wish You” always a litany?  Do you think of it as more of a litany, elegy, admonishment, or something else?

I set out to write a sonnet where I was going to rhyme the same word fourteen times.  That seemed an interesting challenge to me—I wasn’t sure if it would result in litany or just plain repetitive obsession.  Obviously, I ended up bending a bit on the original intention.

One poem that was on my mind a great deal when I wrote this was W.S. Merwin’s “Paul,” which is one of my all-time favorites.  I love how that poem takes hatred so far that we begin to see shadows of love the same way we see shadows of the titular character in everything even though he never appears.  With “Death, I Wish You,” I was hoping I could take hatred so far that it eventually became clinical or sterile.

2. This poem confronts the kinds of images we subsume with death  (“by a thousand cuts,” “on the motorway in your brand new Chrysler SUV,” “unlocking the apartment with the super’s spare key”), but also ones we wouldn’t necessarily, maybe what we’d call ‘little deaths’: ending film credits (the death of a film), the eloquent filibuster (the death of an argument).  How do you tune yourself towards a subject so universal and re-see it, re-circle, reclaim it as your own? 

On this subject, I don’t think I’m trying to reclaim it as my own—I’m trying to claim it for someone else!

Seriously, though, the original idea was to depersonalize the poem’s hatred; I wanted to start with imagery that could be specific to a single person and end with a sort of neuter personification of capital-D Death.  (I may have been reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series at the time.) That’s another idea that didn’t survive all the way through to the final draft, though you can still see that characterization a bit.

This is one of those subjects that’s going to take you somewhere interesting, no matter how well you plan for it.

3. In a previous Collagist interview, you defended energy and economy in poetry on the microlevel – that a one-line poem can be as potent as a hundred-line poem – what you called “miracles of compression.”  How do you know when to compress and expand on a poem’s energy?  How did you know where to end this one?

The formal challenge of the first draft gave me a stopping point, one I was somewhat thankful for.  The form presented a fascinating difficulty—how I was going to create some kind of argumentative turn in a poem that repeated the same word once per line.

I feel like I still have a million things to learn about compression, but expanding the energy of a poem has been the more difficult thing for me, recently. The formal challenge of the poem ended up giving me an opportunity to spend a lot more time exploring one thing than I normally allow myself.

4. Should this poem, has this poem been read aloud?  How do you hope the hammer of ‘death’ strikes your readers at the end of each line, especially in moments like: “death/definitely, and decisive in its leisure, death/humming, still…”? 

I’ve only read this poem at one public reading.

My friend Matthew Poindexter, when he read the poem in The Collagist, said he thought the poem would be better if you imagined it as a metal song where the whole band shouts “DEATH” after each line.  I love that idea.  If anyone ever does a reading backed by a metal band, please, please, please, invite me to open for you.

5. What are you writing now?

Draft after draft, each circling around some of the same old obsessions.

6. What have you been reading lately, and do you find it mingling, interfering, co-opting with your own work?

I’ve been in a new day job for the last five months, so I have been reading a lot more nonfiction than normal. Some of it is specific to education, some of it is about management, some of it is just productivity pr0n, like David Allen’s books. Some of it aspires to “futurism” but actually just describes markets and technologies that are already in existence and haven’t yet been fully adopted.  I don’t know how much that’s actually influencing my own work, other than that I’m writing more recently in an attempt to make sense of the disparate streams of information coming from the two very different career paths I’m attempting to juggle. Sooner or later, I suppose, it’ll filter into the work, because I’m a big believer that the books we read end up being recycled into the books we write.  Poetry-wise, the most exciting books I’ve read in the past few months have been Dilruba Ahmed’s Dhaka Dust, John Murillo’s Up Jump the Boogie, and Paisley Reckdal’s A Crash of Rhinos, which I discovered only about a decade after everyone else.