A Conversation with Mischa Willett

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 3

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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"Perhaps, however hard it is,
we are here to pronounce house,
fruit-tree, fountain, tower, to realize
speech is a rendering that requires
deep dreaming."

from The Elegy Beta by Mischa Willett

We met at a coffee shop because Mischa Willett was worried that kids spilling Cheerios during the interview might be a bit distracting. I told him that after raising five children, I would feel right at home. So by way of compromise, I suppose, he brought his effervescent wife and three kids with him to the interview. Unfortunately, Two Kick Coffee, a converted motorcycle shop, was closing. We bought drinks and walked the three blocks to his office on campus, his family veering off to enter their house nearby. 

Willett's office was once a dorm room. Now, the cinder block walls are lined with shelves weighed down by books. We sat down at the round table where I was immediately distracted by the beautiful volume, A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry, published by Copper Canyon Press. And next to it, the work of Philip James Bailey whose influence on Walt Whitman was unfathomable and who wrote the single most-read poem during the 19th century. 

Already, we were immersed in words, surrounded by them, swimming in them, admiring them. Mischa's boyish delight in poetry, in words, was striking, even contagious. I say to him, "Mischa, there's an urgency and intensity to your writing that I really admire. Your poetry seems to be a response to what's happening around you."

"T.S. Eliot said that each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate," he replies. "I think that any work that's taking chaos and ordering it is co-laboring with the Holy Spirit. Whether the chaos is the human heart, time and its ravages, or language itself. All of that is holy work, maybe even if it's not done intentionally to the glory of God. It might be glorifying nonetheless because you're doing your human work. And I don't care if you're planting bean rows like Yeats or making a sonnet, you know." He pauses.

"I guess I'm a Romanticist by training, so Shelley comes to mind: 'Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.' We are fragmenting things needlessly, you know what I mean? There's a Word beneath the words that holds everything together. That is real and true, and poetry isn't artificially putting an order on things so you can feel good for a while. That's what it feels like for me in writing. What's that Seamus Heaney poem? “Digging”? You know, to dig with your little spade toward that wholeness."

"Do you feel like writing is a kind of compulsive digging for you, a continuous digging? At what point would you say you've done your work."

"That's interesting," he says. "You know, I don't feel my creaturely best unless I'm writing. If you don't take your dog out for a walk enough..." He laughs. "They get a little ornery, but they're totally better after they exercise. That's what writing feels like to me. If I'm not writing..."

"And your wife would verify that?"

"For sure!" If I'm acting a certain way, she'll say, 'Honey, have you been making anything lately?'" We laugh. We do this a lot throughout the interview. 

"So there's a kind of self-serving, a good kind of self-serving, in writing," I say. "Writing poetry does something in you and for you, but what can it do for others? How does it serve people who are just trying to survive life?"

"I think it was Franz Kafka who said that literature must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us. I wrote that in my journal twenty years ago. I think the frozen sea is real. The pop singers are crying out, 'Wake me up! Wake me up inside.' People are sort of yelling this into the void. They feel like there's something else, something more, that maybe they are sleepwalking. This isn't a judgment, it's how people feel—is this all there is? There has to be something more. I think for me, and for many people I know, poetry has served that function to suggest the numinous when all they had was a boring phenomenology. I think poetry can be a first inkling of that transcendent order. I mean, there might a sunset, or a person, or a song that speaks to them with that spark, but..." 

"Or Balaam's talking donkey?" We laugh some more.

"You can have something that's just a few lines long, but it can change a life. That's crazy. What kind of work is this that we get to do?"

"When you finish a poem, do you feel like you have made this thing? Or do you feel like you have stewarded this thing?"

"That's interesting," he says. "I think of my poems like my children. I know that's common, but as soon as it exists, it exists. It has its own life and its own rights. I'm proud of it in a particular way, but I can't choose which one I like best or which one will impact people the most. I just rejoice that they're out there and I want people to experience them. I meet so many poets who act ashamed of what they've made and hate self-promotion, but I want to say, 'No, you're not promoting yourself, you're promoting the poem. You made this thing, hopefully for their joy and for their encouragement. Why wouldn't you want to share that?' It doesn't make any sense to me. I know I sound silly, but whenever I finish a poem, I stand up from this table and clap my hands and charge out to tell someone, 'Hey! Is anyone around? You'll never believe what just happened in there! It happened! Lightning! It was dead, now it's alive. They were just words and now there's a poem." We laugh.

"When did poetry awaken you?"

"My parents were teenagers when I came along. My mom was 15 years old. We were dirt poor and living on food stamps in Arizona. They were intelligent people, but they didn't have time to cultivate the mind. I had four siblings. And we were peripatetic, I moved schools 20 times before I left home. I thought that was normal. I mean, I don't lament it in any way. But there are these snatches of memory: I remember staying in from recess in fourth grade to read poems my teacher had written. What kind of fourth grader stays in from recess to read extra poetry?"

"Yes, I was going to ask if you were in trouble!" We laugh.

"I know! And what kind of teacher shares her private poetry? I must have shown some unusual interest in poetry to prompt that. Then around fifth grade I started mowing lawns and getting a little money which I spent on books. I would go to garage sales and raid the used poetry books. I didn't know one from another. Books and Craftsman tools because I had heard that they were a really good brand to have. Assuming I would use them. But that was it. Not board games or sports, just books."

"The impulse was there from an early age."

"Yes, and I have no idea where it came from," he says, shaking his head.

"I never saw my dad with a book. Not one time. The television was on all of the time. But I do remember the closest stirring to a literary response was hearing my mother read the King James Bible, which she did fairly faithfully. I remember one time, you know, wearing my footy pajamas, when I wasn't listening to the words anymore, I was leaning into the music of the words. Later, in high school of course, I started writing poetry for girls."

"They're a great motivator."

"Yes, indeed. God has a design." We laugh.

"What led you to the Romantics and to grad school."

"I applied to Wheaton College. It was the only school I applied to. I didn't know it was difficult to get into, I just thought that's where I'm going to go. Here's this kid from the wrong side of the tracks attending school in what was, at the time, the third wealthiest county in America. I honestly don't think I had ever seen a man wearing khaki pants until I got there, had certainly never met a professor. My parents didn't take me, I just got on a plane with my little suitcase. It was all very foreign to me. I didn't do well, dropped out after the first quarter. Returned home and worked at the mall. I thought, this is terrible, so I went back, but had an argument with my roommate and dropped out again. Then, one of my professors called me on the phone. This was before the internet, so he had to have hunted down my phone number. He reached my mother who gave him my work number where I was measuring men's necks for fitted shirts, talked to my manager who got me on the phone and told me that I should go back to college. He said what are you doing with your life? Get over here. No one had ever talked to me that way before, so I did." 

"Who was that professor?"

"His name was Jeff Davis. He would later become Dean at Wheaton College. He led a trip to Oxford every summer and invited me to join. So I went to and, as Lewis said regarding George MacDonald, it baptized my imagination. I had never seen people take education and beauty so seriously. We were playing soccer on a beach in Wales one evening, having just spent time at Dylan Thomas's house, when he looked at me with a smile and said, 'This is how I spend my summers.' And I thought, right there, this guy has figured something out. I knew what my dad's summers were like—exactly the same as his falls and winters—and he complained every time he came home from work, but this guy is doing this right now and it counts as a job? Dude!" We laugh.

"So Jeff Davis taught me Romanticism where I was assigned to a Percy Shelley presentation group," he says. "I thank God now because, if I had been assigned some other poet, I'm not sure it would have stuck. But Shelley, that was just it for me. I read everything—notes, fragments, letters. I was absolutely ablaze. That lasted through graduate school."

"When you look at Shelley, how do you reconcile a life so squandered? Not just Shelley, but the entire history of literature is full of writers who left a trail of carnage? And yet, somehow, they had the ability to express something transcendent, something beautiful."

"So there's a memorial sculpture to Shelley in University College in Oxford, which is interesting because he was thrown out of that college. There's this rotunda that is both beautiful and grotesque at the same time. Shelley is fully nude, having recently washed up on the beach from drowning. The sculpture is white marble held aloft by obsidian angels, black angels. I think it should be the other way around. His heart was black as all sin, but the angels are using him, God is making the most of his gift, almost despite him. And maybe that's what God does with all of us. There's a holiness to the inspiration, though his life is dark. Weirdly, the poets I love most have that contradiction."

"You write in a variety of styles."

"I write formal poetry—metrical, rhymed, fixed form poetry—sometimes. But I find it easier to do that than to write free verse."

"How would you respond to Robert Frost's famous critique that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down?"

"Ah, well, that one smarts. I like Robert Frost, I respect him. He's not a flippant sort of person." He laughs. "Maybe it's risky to go against Frost. I'll offer a counter argument. Maybe it's akin to abstract painting, not all abstract art, but the best of it which is really compelling to me. The painter's job is to be true to the gestures he has started. He can deal falsely with whatever he's been given by imposing a predetermined order. It's like jazz. Someone starts doing something and even if that someone is you, you can't just do whatever you want next. The best jazz isn't truly free. The musician has an obligation to the other musicians and to the structure suggested, even if it appears at first structureless."

"It seems to me that you're saying—with all due respect to Mr. Frost—you're playing a different game. It's not tennis at all. You're suggesting that to say all formal poetry is like playing tennis is to reduce the poem to something transactional. Is it a misunderstanding of the nature of free verse?"

"Yes. I guess I'm suggesting that free verse isn't really free," he says. "That's why I'm feeling a little bit of resistance. It's not like it's the Wild West. The poems I write have rules that govern them, I'm just discovering them as I go. It's not the same as having no rules. It's crazy to think about, but I'll compose a line and think, 'That's wrong!' What am I talking about? According to whom? I wrote it. I can do whatever I want, but still. I know it's wrong. And sometimes I can't fix it. There's nothing I can do. Sometimes even after fifteen years, I can't fix the problems that I created in it. That means I'm bound to something, some rule. In metered poetry, it is easy to identify problems. It's much harder in free verse. You're building the thing as you're flying it. You're asking, given x—whatever line that might be—what must necessarily follow?"

"Do you find that to be true at the ends of lines as well?" I ask. Do you find yourself saying, 'I can't end the line there'? How do you make those decisions? I'm speaking here as someone who used to hate poetry and who found free verse horribly random. I can appreciate those who look at a line that ends without a logical reason and wonder what's going on." 

"I can, too. Line endings—lineation—is my favorite part of the practice, actually. Not word choice, topics, new poems, or even poem endings. I love the well-placed line break. A line has done its work when it opens onto possibility. When it suggests—I don't know, it feels like Magneto walking out onto the air or something—it suggests that if you kept going in this direction, such and such would happen. Sometimes I tell my MFA students, 'That line hasn't earned its existence. You carved it there, you made it. You need to give it more weight to carry, more music, more life. Someone once said you have to put every word on trial for its life. That's how I think about the poetic line. This is getting down to brass tacks here, but if I end up like Sappho and all that remains are fragments, does that line do enough that it would be worth saving? Regardless of where it goes from here? Then I know that the line has ended."

"Then the following line would earn its weight in relation to the previous line? Meaning that it either reinforces or subverts or turns it in a new direction?"

"Precisely. As a reader, we come to the end of a line where it launches into ideal space—the white part of the page—and the mind has enough time to try and finish the line. This happens in conversation, too. We try to finish each other's sentences. That's delightful for you, as a reader, to find out whether you were right or whether you were fantastically wrong. If you are wrong enough times, eventually you shut up and listen and let the person talk. That's a nice place to be. Silenced. Then you just feel held, comfortable."

"You're talking about a paradoxical peace. There's tension, but also completion or resolution."

"Is the writing process clarifying to you as well? Do you write to process your life? Is it a release of tension?"

"No, I wish it was. You know, I used to be an amateur photographer. This was before digital, so I would spend hours in the darkroom and it was very peaceful. I could lose myself in there, just focusing on how much time has passed, is this the right tone? Poetry causes me to worry. It hurts. My hair falls out. I get up in the middle of the night. If I write a bad line, it haunts me. I obsess. I spent eleven years working on the book, The Elegy Beta. Eleven years during which I thought about the poems every single day. It's obsessive, it's probably unhealthy. I would probably have a more peaceful life if I just knocked off writing poetry. But poetry has also given me my greatest aesthetic highs. I feel a debt to poetry for giving me those moments of clarity, beauty, joy."

"If our gifts are meant for community, how do you advise young poets avoid the poison of rivalry? How do they navigate life as an artist without succumbing to envy?"

"You know, some communities are rife with it. I've been in places where we would rank ourselves, right? We knew who was better than us and we knew who was worse. And everyone was looking sideways—'Who has been published and should I stab them?' It was knives out all the time. But to be in a community of Christians is entirely different. It feels like holy work. I don't know, is it just something that happens among believers?"

"Maybe the purpose is different. The Christian lens is a different lens. And the Holy Spirit brings harmony."

"Maybe just getting yourself off center stage is part of it. If all of us know that we're serving some other Person, then maybe we don't get as anxious. No one is leaping onto the pedestal, so there's a real difference. The best artistic communities on this earth, in any genre, are gatherings of Christians. I know that one hundred percent. I wouldn't have thought that back in the day. I used to be a bit snide about evangelical art—you know, ‘it's not that good’ and all that—but I no longer think that and I know, for certain, that they're more nurturing and healthy communities."

"What are some of the missteps that young poets are making?"

"Young writers, people who are new to the craft, no matter how old, tend to be impatient. They cobble together a manuscript and think it's ready for publication. I often have to tell them that this thing they think is finished is actually a great start to a poem that they may not be capable of finishing right now. They may not be technically ready. They may not be emotionally ready. They just want to finish it in a week. I write my poems until I can't write them anymore. Then I come back to it later to see if I can finish it. That may be a week, two weeks, a year? Some of these poems on my desk are seven years old. I still don't know what to do with them. Maybe some new things need to happen to me before I can finish. I think playing the long game is the main thing."

"Not to sound weird or anything, but do you find that random events, comments, quotes come along to help you solve a poem that you're thinking about? As if there's some conspiracy to help you finish what you're working on?"

"Yes. That used to surprise me. It doesn't anymore. You know, the world is structured and not by a logic, but by a Person. Christ, the heart of creation. This same Person who knows and saved me, is the same one who holds the universe together. I don't think it's crazy that events in my life would stack up to help me do the work God made me to do. If there's a Logos and it is one with God and I'm one with God in a certain way, it's not crazy to think that I could leave these poems around and something would come along to teach me to complete the work."

We chatted about this and that for a while and it involved a great deal of laughter, but I finally asked him how he would complete the following: "Dear Poet..." He paused, then he apologized for being a bit sentimental. 

"I feel like a great deal of my work is trying to figure out how to thank people who are dead, who have given me so much," he says with boyish gratitude. "What is my interior landscape without their poems? Whoever else they wrote those poems for, they wrote them for me. Those poems found me. I feel like I owe them for blessing me so much. I want my work and my life to honor their lives and their work. I guess I would simply say, 'Dear Poet, thank you.'"

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Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.

Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.