A week after we saw LCD Soundsystem perform at the Knockdown Center in Queens, Christian Wessels and I sat down to talk about his forthcoming collection Who Follow the Gleam. Much of our conversation considered the book as a record of various sorts of education—literary, historical, and emotional. These spaces of discovery combine to create a moving experience, a reaching for understanding through moments of genuine bewilderment. “Sympathetic Magic from the Black Forest,” the opening poem of the book, is an intertextual epic in a vein similar to Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The speaker sees his spirit separate from himself during what seems like an asthma or panic attack in an enchanted forest. The moments that follow feel like a multivalent experience of its fearsome unfamiliarity. Like many of Wessels’ long poems, the sections are stitched together obliquely; often blending various voices, genres, and tones so that the boundaries between memory and hallucination, fairytale and lyric migrate unpredictably.
“Sympathetic Magic” includes a macabre fairytale called “Goosegirl and Me,” a “Black Forest Folk Song,” and a biographical note, among other lyric sections. These sections conjure the rhythms and narrative gestures of childhood and suffuse them with a mature poetic awareness of history’s reverberations. The return to childlike speech feels like a reflection of the speaker’s placement in the unfamiliar territory of the Black forest and in Germany writ large. “Black Forest Folk Song” notices the construction of a German word “Nagoldtal” – the combined name of a German river and the word valley and proceeds to affix the prefix Nagold- to various English words, “Nagoldnanny” and “Nagoldsky.” It’s a whimsical, musical illustration of the way the mind seeks and discovers possible systems of meaning.
Our swift immersion in the rhythms, names, and language of the Black Forest is softened through the mixture of music and storytelling that soothes sleepless children. While a lullaby may seem to simplify the world for a child’s mind, Wessels plays with music and form in ways that amplify its complexity. The singsong lilt of “Black Forest Folk Song” eventually gives way to another confrontation with mortality. In lighter moments Wessels also uses these forms as foundations for flights of imaginative fancy, rooted in the transformative power of repetition.
We are not always expected to recognize these references or know where the reference ends and the poet’s imagination begins. But these poems invite me to share the space of bewilderment with the speaker, to think of what language can become when our ability to feel certain is reduced. Considerations of childlike speech comprehension often emerge in the speaker’s addresses to his child, Lola. In “Healing Charm for the End of the Day,” the speaker’s daughter sees him crying after using an inhaler then
She fits the bottle to my nostrils,
Back and forth, imitating my action
repeating the chang Papa why-ing
because her developing speech
forbids harder sounds
The “harder sound” also contains a harder realization of the father’s vulnerability. The emotional complex of playfulness that emerges from the child’s attempt to understand is touching and funny and bracingly genuine. In the reduction of possible speech meaning articulates, so that the child appears to be making a question out of what she observes. Education is a many-layered complex in Who Follow the Gleam, I think of the work of discovering meaning in moments of instability. Meaning feels like an emergent possibility throughout these pages, the conditions that make articulate speech difficult or impossible, and the recourse that poetry offers out of those conditions.
In our interview we discussed other instances of Wessels’s poetic considerations of speech that may not “cohere with the world around you” as well as some of the ways that interacting with his wife’s hometown and her family in Germany influenced the work.
Christian and I talked on two occasions over Zoom. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Tobi Kassim: I just wanted to open with your overall sense of Who Follow The Gleam. Could you briefly discuss a few of the overarching concerns in the book, and how being in Germany influenced the book?
Christian Wessels: I didn’t really think of particular concerns in the book. They kind of unfolded naturally. Because it was what I was paying attention to in Germany. It was what I was learning when I was there, what I was reading. It just sort of became intuitive to write about those things and write about my daughter. But looking at it now, as a whole project, it very much feels to me like a book about education.
When we’re not teaching, we go to Dillweißenstein, Tanja’s hometown, a small village in the northern Black Forest. I’m not sure there’s been a notable shift in thinking based in place, though, because writing about the books and people around me was a way of learning how to be there. Or I’m reluctant to claim a more specialized manner of writing because of our home life. I don’t think of it so much as engaging with German literary culture, though I’m sure that’s true to a degree, as thinking about Tanja and Lola, the books they can read in German, the traditions.
TK: It’s like an act of devotion. You try to understand where your partner is coming from. So I feel it makes perfect sense that you would go to Germany and say, “OK, I need to understand this place so I can understand my partner’s life a little bit more.” It feels to me like a natural placement. It’s not like “I’m an outsider and I’m here to think in an American way about Germany.”
CW: I think those things can be exaggerated too and I feel reluctant to sort of claim any sort of cultural authority over certain things. I think it can become quickly hyperbolic, positioning oneself relative to a literary culture and also to the dead as a part of that literary culture. At the very least, as an expression of devotion, as you’re saying, or an expression of love, it needs to feel very sincere in its resistance to hyperbole.
TK: One of the poems that I think about a lot is the Kaspar Hauser poem, which is also a particularly German mythology. How did that character become important? The mythology of Kaspar Hauser is that he’s somebody who grew up without language, right?
CW: Yeah, Kaspar Hauser was found as a young man on the streets of Nuremberg without the ability to speak and was clearly not socialized. And maybe that’s all we have to say about him for now, but the connection to Tanja and how I discovered him was when we first went to Germany, we were driving around the Northern Black Forest and passed a church. She said that the remains of Kaspar Hauser are buried there. It’s very important because if those remains are exhumed, they could test the DNA to see if he was the product of incest, and it would prove that one of the royal lines was incestuous, which is why ultimately he was abandoned and raised in captivity.
She told me this story, and I was fascinated. And then, from there, I watched the Herzog movie. As it regards my book more broadly, I was less interested in that bit of lore and more interested in what it would mean to learn how to speak in a way that doesn’t cohere with the world around you.
TK: I’m curious about the distance between poems of autobiographical origin and poems that skew toward dramatic monologue. Because in your book, they are united somewhat by a central first-person speaker. I encounter different forms of the “I” from poem to poem but I also encounter the same “I.” So you can be convinced that you’re seeing the same person speaking. I still find myself surprised in the shift from your contemporary, Christian Wessels character “I” to the historic or mythic speakers that also populate the book. Do you think that there are elements that unite the personal and the archival/ historical voices for you? And if so, what might those elements have been?
CW: I’ve had this instinct to disappear a little bit behind formal artifice. It’s something that was really intense for me when I started writing poetry in college. And the language used to describe those poems at the time couldn’t really pinpoint the way the obfuscation was happening. And then that changed in my MFA, when I kind of erupted into writing pretty explicitly about things that I experienced in my life. And it’s been tricky for me since then to find a balance because I haven’t ever really lost that impulse of trying to disappear a little bit. I never thought about saying, despite the nod to Tennyson, that I’m going to write a dramatic monologue. It just felt natural for me to locate in Kaspar Hauser, for example, a way to get at something slightly more intimate that would be harder to access otherwise.
TK: I associate your earlier work with blank verse attention to line, line balance and diction. I thought it was at least very pleasurable to read.
CW: I feel resistant to a poetry that is only defined by the epiphanic. And I feel like, because of our history of American poetry, so much of it is relative to whether or not that epiphany happens in a confessional mode. And I think at least early on, I wanted to know what happens if that “Epiphanic moment” just happens in formal terms without something semantic breaking otherwise. I guess this book kind of enacts those questions too, because if I think of it as a book of education, I’m trying to answer that question for myself.
TK: I think you’ve also been writing longer poems for as long as I’ve known you. And I admired Who Follow the Gleam for these radical leaps between sections. Most of the poems in the collection can be described as long poems in sections. And that creates, I think, space for you to stretch the scope of each poem so they don’t become hyper-focused in any particular way. Do you work with central elements that help you manage where each section will go? Or do you find that there’s a kind of like a mysterious strong force that pulls parts of the poem or parts of fragments or drafts into relation with each other?
CW: I never set out with a project in mind—with a few exceptions, the Hölderlin poem being one example. I was reading his work that summer and then we visited his home in Tübingen. And we brought Lola. It was so thrilling to watch her engage with the space of the tower without actually knowing anything about its literary history.
But the boring answer to this question is that scope is mostly intuitive – that I don’t begin with anything in mind. Or I usually don’t set out to write a long or short poem, it’s something I know after first putting words on the page. I generally resist having a project in mind, and I certainly don’t want to plan a poem beforehand. The poets I admired when I first started writing poetry also wrote long poems, and that’s partly how I learned to think about poetry. Stevens and Frost in particular (who wrote very different kinds of long poems), then I was fortunate enough to study with poets who also have thought deeply about the long poem, so this impulse has been fostered for a long time. I like walking, and there’s a lot of walking in this book. I like thinking about how distinct parts can cohere to make a single experience but, at the same time, can be made to feel individually precise.
TK: Another uniquely Christian Wessels approach that I noticed in this book is your interest in repeating, torquing, twisting phrases to end up in different spaces of meaning. Do you think you fixate on these root phrases to start? And does that fixation feel sonic or do you see other opportunities in a sentence or a phrase that could bend in certain grammatical ways in the future?
CW: It’s another thing I’ve been obsessed with for a long time, chants and incantation. Thematically there’s an obvious place in the book. The sonic quality of chants deepens as the actual words are estranged from their context. This is very close to what I love about poetry, when the sounds and syntactical patterns are so moving that we’re experiencing them without really thinking about how they function semantically. I feel like there’s a distancing that happens when a poem has a refrain, and that distance asks us to think more about sound than about meaning. I don’t necessarily believe in poetry as a medium for communication. There are other methods for that, to say more precisely what we mean. I do believe poetry, through its formal arrangement, can get at something otherwise inexpressible, and repetition dramatizes that process for me.
TK: I love that. What you said about getting further from their ostensible meaning. I didn’t mention, but there’s a real defamiliarizing aspect by the end of an incantation. Are these words still words?
CW: And something’s changed in the meantime, too.
TK: This calls back to my earlier question about the first-person speaker a bit, but I think the dramatic monologue is important to your project in part because the Victorian era of poetry is important to your project. Notably your epigraph and title come from Alfred Lord Tennyson, speaking as a different person. How did the (sometimes maligned) Victorian Era help you shape your poetics in this project?
CW: Tennyson’s son Hallam said this poem offers an account of his father’s “literary history.” Tennyson, at the end of his life, sick with rheumatic gout, thinking about biography, was managing his posthumous reputation, not wanting to be dissected by the public and literary critics. I’m not by any means a scholar of Victorian poetry. I guess what I’m saying is that the title is more incidental than it’s meant to express a devotion to Tennyson. I was writing about magic, and I was reading Tennyson as I was reading some other things. The title fits because I think of this book as my “literary history” as a kind of education: in poetry, in fatherhood, partly in grief.
TK: So there’s a chunk of poems in the middle of the book, that do some historical work and take particularly hard looks at some of the worst aspects of human depravity. “Gesualdo in Five Voices,” in particular, takes the murderous composer as its focal point and it opens on, a really harrowing act of cruelty and then, of course, there’s the Hölderlin’s Tower poem which we just briefly talked about, which refers to the blood that was used to make fresco paint. So one of the themes that I picked out in that section was the inextricability of art making and violence. Not always super graphic violence, but could you reflect on a little bit more on how that violence and art mixes for you? I guess it also might connect to the Kaspar Hausar situation where someone tries to speak out of numbing or dumbing history.
CW: I want to say this thing about hyperbole, and maybe it’s useful to just connect it to a personal anecdote from my life. There’s a lot of walking in the book, a lot of walking through the Black Forest, and between our apartment and the trail, there are several buildings with shrapnel holes in the wall, covered with plastic, from when the village was bombed at the end of World War II by American and British soldiers. Tanja’s great-grandparents were killed in that bombing. And her grandfather grew up without parents from a very young age. A lot of the stories that I’m encountering and I’m thinking about when I’m there are surrounded by acts of violence.
I don’t think of art making and violence as intertwined in a moralistic way—in the sense that a poem must always account for this enmeshment to some degree—because I resist language that confines poetry to determining factors, ideas that exist before we come to the page. This is obviously not possible really, but I think it’s a healthy attitude to have given the state of American poetry, which is filled with great formal diversity. I want to believe in a poetics that accounts for all kinds of poems, which means resisting generalizations and paying attention to what we know for certain: a poem’s individual relationship to sound, to syntax, to structural order and disorder. Or I don’t want to get in the way of a poem, except as a medium for its sound. That’s kind of an evasive answer, but it gets at my difficulty: I don’t have a straightforward explanation that would apply to both Gesualdo and that line from “In Hölderlin’s Tower.” The function of violence—embodied, depicted, symbolized—will depend on the poem.
TK: I told you I was deeply moved by the poem “Our Snail”, and we talked a bit about it before the interview. I think your introduction was really interesting. So maybe I’ll let you first talk about the poem.
CW: Last Christmas, Tanja’s grandmother told me a story about her own father, how he would make-up stories about a snail for her and her twin sister, then improvise the narrative based on their reactions. Except Oma Lola speaks in a thick dialect, so I could only make out half the story. The next morning I wrote “Our Snail” based on what I understood.
TK: So. In that long, improvised story that Tanja’s grandmother described, the snail starts to feel like an illustration of a vulnerable person or population searching for refuge. And the storyteller’s extension of the snail story feels like a way of shielding the children from having to deal with the snail’s loss or the snail getting killed or something. At a certain point, you have to ask what kind of consolation is possible for a story. And in the poem, the listener as a grownup says, “We knew he lied. Or at least imagine that parts of our shared life were not true.” It’s like one of the limits of storytelling is eventually the person you’re telling the story will be old enough to realize that it’s not possible or that it’s not real. I guess this is a very conceptual question. But is there a different kind of consolation to be found in the fact that a poem or a story can’t carry a false conception of the world, even if it’s comforting?
CW: I think poems can console but largely not in the way that is accepted. I often think poets and critics of poetry generalize on what poems can do, as I say, then become obsessed with that kind of response, narrowing the conditions for poetry. I love poetry enough to know that it’s existed in a variety of forms and its impact depends on the culture in which its produced, and I also love poetry enough to know that it depends not on consolation (which may be a byproduct) but on sound, intuition, and figurative discovery.
So much of the book takes as a question the act of storytelling, especially to children. And in my experience with Lola, I’ll make up stories with her every night. And when it’s unfaithful to the terms that I’ve set up, she knows how to steer us back. I’m interested in that question of intuition that’s built into children from early years before they really have access to language, because that’s a tonal question. I mean, they have access to their own kind of language, of course, and they know how to communicate in their own language, their own vocabulary or whatever, but not the way that you and I speak. There’s something about form and method that clues them into what is being communicated silently, or otherwise, not semantically, as would be true for Kaspar Hauser. So I guess that’s one answer to the question.
What “Our Snail” is doing is improvising based on reaction because it’s anticipating what someone, a child, might need and then failing. And I think that failure is pretty interesting.
TK: You just mentioned, reading to Lola, Lola’s ability to perceive—not just when language is wrong, but when the tone or form is different or interesting. I think kids’ attention to tonality and voice is really fascinating because they’re so perceptive. How does it feel to address your family members, specifically Lola, as readers and interlocutors in the poems? And how do you think about the future in which Lola might read these poems?
CW: For me, Lola has been just the best interlocutor for the reason that you’re describing. Because she’s so perceptive, tonally, like I’d say all children are to some degree as they’re learning language. There are so many moments that I can think of where I’m talking to Lola and I don’t think she really understands the words, but she’s staring at me. Inquisitively, like she knows what’s going on, but it’s really just a question of my tone, it’s my tone that clues her into what I’m actually asking for, and so then we just pause, and finally she picks it up and we can talk.
I want my daughter to be proud of me and feel that the complexity of her life has been represented. I don’t care so much about posterity, but I do care about her memory. Addressing my family and friends as interlocutors, it’s more that it feels very natural for them to be there with me (maybe another way of disappearing). My only hobby in life is chatting and telling stories. I don’t know who else would be in the poem with me, and it’s a lot easier to not disappear if I’m talking with my friends or Tanja or Lola.
TK: Our friend Aaron, who has two daughters, always used to tell me one thing that he’s leaving behind is a way for his daughters to know him better than they could know him if he were just, like, hanging out with them. And time will tell if that fully bears out historically, but it is interesting.
CW: I don’t anticipate Lola would have that reaction reading my poems. I think she knows me in a much more raw and vulnerable way than my poems would suggest. But I also want her to know she’s a part of my writing in this way, in a very major way.