Interview: Andrew Kozma

Poet & Playwright

Your poetry collection, City of Regret is full of walls, alleys, contained spaces, bordered by entrances and exits which seem to delineate an interior rather than suggest something beyond the space. Is this feeling of containment something you intended in these poems?

Yes, I suppose it was something I intended. Once I had the poem “Dis” I knew that there was going to be some centering around the idea of a physical city, even if that city existed as well in metaphor and emotion. The construction of the book in sections named for elements of containment was an element that arrived pretty late in the book’s genesis. I think it was the third or fourth major revision.

But once that decision towards ordering was made, it not only brought out all the ideas in the poems that already addressed containment, but slanted the reading of those poems that weren’t obviously about interiors, physical or otherwise. And what I want the experience of reading the book to be is one of traveling through a defined space, even if it’s defined differently for each individual.

The critical event that generated this collection was the death of your father. Were you and he able to share language and poetry in your childhood and/or as adults together?

Both my parents are big readers, but my tastes run closer to my mom’s than my dad’s. As he grew older, his reading turned more and more towards religious philosophy, the mystics of various religions that, in the most basic way, all seem to be saying the same thing about the greater force that we call God. In short, a subject that I find almost inherently uninteresting.

But he had a chance to read my poetry and fiction before he died. Though I assume he must have read some of my writing, the only proof of his exposure to what I’d written comes from his attending plays I’d written. A year and a half before he died, my parents attended my undergraduate senior thesis, a series of four interlinked plays. Afterwards, they said that they realized, while watching them, that writing was actually something I could successfully create my life around. Which, I guess, meant that they could see how people who weren’t my parents could be moved by what I wrote.

How do you approach the work of writing poetry? Do you have a method or just enjoy the madness?

I approach writing poetry the same way I approach any writing. I sit down at a table and set my pen to paper and hope that something interesting will come out.

A gross simplification, I admit.

Here’s a slightly more complicated version. I write first drafts on paper. There’s something about the slide of the pen over the page that feeds back into the writing process, that lets me feel as though I’m truly engaged in creating. I write from the beginning to the end, starting with the first line or a title, and allow the poem to establish the rules for its own creation. An image leads to another image. An urge to rhyme in the first few lines might establish the poem as a sonnet. I almost never set down a line or a word just to push myself forward; I believe in everything I set down in that first draft, though I admit that creator’s blindness often hides flaws from me that become clear over the course of a few days or weeks.

And though that sounds like method, it feels more like madness. Each time I set down to write a poem I’m engaged in the hope that the end result will be meaningful, and hope is nothing but a form of madness.

I know that you like to write in many genres including drama and non-fiction. Tell us something about your dramaturgical life…

Mostly, it’s been private, even though productions of my plays involve direct interaction with other people. The problem is that I know how to get my poetry and my fiction and my essays out into the world where they will be read by people – even if I never see or meet most of the people who read my work. With theater, the entire goal is personal interaction, but the world of theater and theaters and production is an enigma to me at present.

Recently I co-founded a theater company in Houston – Theater 42 – as a way to get into the theatrical scene. We’ve only produced work that I’ve written so far, and I must admit that was one of the main draws to starting my own company, though I’d never consider doing a similar thing for my other writing. Starting a literary journal to publish your own work means that you’re the arbiter of quality, a significant act of hubris, whereas putting on your own play still leaves the audience as the final judge. If they like it, they will tell other people and the audience will increase. Otherwise, an empty theater.

Where does Bioshock fit into this picture? I thought gaming was supposed to be brain death and just plain evil.

I’ve been playing computer games since I was about ten. I see games and gaming as more interactive than television or movies, and exercising a different part of the brain than reading. In most games you’re constantly solving one problem after another. But that’s only a general defense.

With Bioshock and Fallout 3 and games of a similar ilk, what keeps me enthralled is the story. Here is where books, television & movies, and games all overlap for me – the story is all. That story doesn’t have to be narrative, exactly, but it has to be emotional and engrossing. In order for me to feel invested, I have to believe that the author or creators are invested. And when that happens, the art – in whatever form – inspires me to feel, to think, or to create art of my own.

And it’s true that sometimes I feel games as a drain on my life and creativity, but that’s mostly because I spend a few hours playing one only to realize that there’s no story at the heart of it to keep my interest. If all I’m doing is solving a math or physics problem, admittedly one with amazing graphics, I’m left feeling hollow.

Having had the good fortune to meet you on the road to Taos, I know that you have a playful, joyous aspect to your character and I was delighted to see that part of you show up in one of my favorite poems from your collection, “Not A Love Letter”.

“I cannot make myself a saint. I can make myself a sandwich.” Those lines made my day when I first read them.

And then I read, “Your Sketch of the Church In Mourning” which evoked such a deep wistfulness. How do these disparate moments fit into the experience of mourning?

I never think that there’s not a time for laughter, or for joy. When I learned that my dad was dead, I called my friends in Gainesville and got together a group to go out to eat and laugh, to have a good time with the living.

Similarly, I feel that anything can be made fun of. That’s not the right phrasing; it sounds too mean. What I mean is that anything can be joked about and, in my mind, should be. If our goal is to enjoy this life as fully as possible – and I think that it is – then laughter is simply a symptom of that enjoyment.

Of course, that doesn’t really explain “Your Sketch of a Church in Mourning.”

What does explain it, perhaps, is that I have to admit that laughter and enjoyment can’t be experienced all the time. Or, if it can, it does so only by overlaying sadness.

To take another tack, laughter is a way to deal with what’s happened, while wistfulness is a way of dealing with what has been lost and, so, will never happen. All the conversations that I could’ve had with my father, for example, had he not died so young.

Speaking of Taos, how was it for you?

The Taos Summer Writers’ Conference was really good for me. I met a lot of interesting people (Hi, Carol!) and enjoyed being in a part of the country I’d never visited before, but what was perhaps the most useful aspect for me was the workshop. I took a class on non-fiction with Debra Monroe. I’ve only written two complete non-fiction pieces and parts of several others. Through the class, I came to realize the ways I approach non-fiction, ways that are subconscious and that leave me, at the end of a draft, unclear about how to revise. After Taos, I’ve a clearer idea of what I have done, and what I should be doing.

What’s in the near and not too distant future for you? Conferences, readings, works in the works?

There are no conferences or readings on the horizon. At the moment, I’m enjoying being stationary in Houston and trying to focus on my writing. My current tasks involve working on plays, including a full-length about Christopher Marlowe, and revising and submitting stories to magazines. I’m also still shopping around a young adult novel hoping to capture an agent’s attention. Wish me luck!

POET WILL EAT HIMSELF

It is a statement absorbing all questions. Look out
at the darkness beyond the streetlamp. Who undresses
their hands to feel the raw snow while still miles from home?

During an average lifetime enough skin and hair is shed
to create ourselves several times over. Where are these
empty spaces? Who have I stepped away from?

It’s too late for breakfast, call it what you will. A treatise
on the life cycle is incomplete if it doesn’t say “simple cellulose
can not be absorbed without attendant organisms, without arrangements

of stomachs filtering in sequence.” With the cropped grass
come stunned butterflies, blind from the sun’s
sudden eclipse. There is always some beauty to be understood

only through digestion. The body itself is a corporation
of vested self-interests, the bacteria in balance with the blood,
the clotted marrow ending in the tiny blue tongues of veins.

from City of Regret, Zone 3 Press 2007

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For more on Andrew Kozma visit his website, his blog An Experiment on A Bird in The Air Pump, and for City of Regret purchase info you can visit SPD Books or Zone 3 Press.

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Interviewed by Carol Reid