AN INTERVIEW WITH R. T. SMITH

Why did you choose Outlaw Style as the title?
I considered a few possibilities, beginning with Outsider Art, since I’m fond of both my poem with that title and the idea of the untutored, sacramental art that’s especially common in the South and is often literally out-of-doors. And since I missed all my chances to take courses in creative writing, it’s often been tempting to think of myself as working in a variation of that tradition, but years in the academy have probably invalidated me as a certified pariah. Still, the primary presences in the book are John Wilkes Booth and people from marginalized communities, musicians Buddy Bolden, Johnny Shines and the Carters, for instance. Outlaws all. It’s tempting to feel a kinship with these folks, no matter how vast our differences, and the title phrase comes from a poem about the eccentric “Carter Scratch” method of playing the guitar.I can’t remember if my editor, Enid Shomer, or I vocalized it first, but I think we hit on a phrase that can stand for the transgressive thread that runs through the book. I hope it’s evident that “outlaw” might be either an adjective or an imperative verb.

Why have you written so many poems about historical figures in general and Booth in particular?
I’m always trying to negotiate between presenting a dramatic character and writing an intensely personal lyric. One of my solutions involves employing the syntax and diction of earlier times and different demographics to inflect my personal version of the vernacular. I really get excited when somebody like Doc Watson plays a fiddle tune on the guitar, and you can hear the fiddle’s shadow in it. Ambitious as that sounds, it’s what I’m after. Also important: it’s really easy when you don’t intentionally refract your voice to forget that every effective poem’s speaker, no matter how intimate, is a construct which merits close scrutiny, and I think adjusting, composing the voice is like tuning the instrument. The unaltered voice is likely to preserve all the laziness of casual speech and none of its improvisational strengths. Of course, I also love reading history, especially the history associated with places in the South I’ve lived in or near. I’m not, however, trying to write myself into the past like some sort of re-enactor, as I know I’m inventing an imagined historical sound, and not the actual thing. I am trying to create an instrument for me to see and hear the past more effectively. I hope it works for others, as well.
Booth? One day in the library I ran across Gordon Samples’ Lust for Fame, which is about Booth’s theatrical career. That led me to a more complicated view of the man than I’d had, which led me to Gene Smith’s American Gothic and then to Michael Kaufman’s biography of Booth and various other sources. His is an amazing, almost Marquezian story, full of signs and portents and unlikely coincidences. He went from matinee idol to monster in the public eye after his unthinkable act, drawing to him so many others – like Boston Corbett – who seemed cursed by some invisible power. I became fascinated with both his precipitous downfall and the ways he seems to represent the demise of American innocence. Even more than Benedict Arnold, he’s out bete noire.

Music and musicians have played a prominent role in both Outlaw Style and earlier collections like Brightwood and The Hollow Log Lounge. Why keep returning to this subject matter?
I’ve been a mediocre drummer and a distinctly ungifted guitar player, but I’m a dedicated listener to bluegrass, blues, old time, jazz, folk. Not an I-poder, but an old-style enthusiast. The lives of musicians also fascinate me, because the ability to make music that moves people seems both a great gift and a great curse. Think of Miles Davis, John Hartford, Byron Berline, Patsy Cline, Billie Holiday.
A few years ago radiation treatment damaged my hearing, and the loss of nuance at some pitches left me thinking about the psychological impact of music as much as the melodic narrative. Despite all my years hanging around universities, I remain convinced that having a dangerous imagination is as important for all kinds of artists as the urge to create orderly shapes. So many of the musicians whose work I’ve loved have possessed and been possessed by these two elements, and they’ve soared on the benefits and suffered the consequences. It’s really hard to be a musician and play it safe, so I’m using them to keep my courage up.

How has being a fiction writer, especially the author of the stories in Uke Rivers Delivers, affected your writing of Outlaw Style?
Some of my stories are lyrically self-indulgent, and some of my poems so narrative-driven that it’s possible to imagine them as prose narratives. I’m living on the threshold. No matter what genre I’m working in, I compose aloud, trying for a mid-point between the understated and the dramatic, compulsively focused on the feel of the words in the vocal mechanism. Sometimes I think I’ve just found two different methods of not writing plays, but I’m not quite ready to wonder what that means.

Your poetry and fiction describe a substantial amount of violent behavior. How did you get such a violent imagination?
I don’t believe I really have a violent imagination, but violent images burn themselves into my memory like acid etching. They seem to sink down to a level of substratum in my dreamworld where they converge and insist. I write about them in the hope of exorcizing or banishing them, but I’m never wholly successful. It seems important to come to terms, to create rhetorical and emotional dynamics that will enact Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion.” Although I get furious about some things, I’m not a belligerent person, despite growing up around men deeply involved in violence. My father, for instance, spent his professional life as an investigator, an interrogator and the director of a school system security force. Trouble was, as they say, his business. The stories he and his cohorts could tell were something to behold. As the narrator of one of my old poems says, “Don’t people know the world is an emergency?” That’s my view, and I feel a need to remind readers.

Would you call yourself a religious writer?
I’m a yearner, a seeker, and though not a member of a passionate religious community, I long to be. The process of making a poem is to a great extent ceremonial for me, and the artifact, the product, becomes a kind of relic, but this may sound like the standard dodge: “I’m spiritual, I’m reverent.” But I’m also a theist. I believe in a world of trials and challenges and a God of order, mercy and mystery. And as one of Tom McGuane’s characters says, “He’s smart as a whip.”

Your wife, Sarah Kennedy, is also a poet. Are two writers in one household too many?
It’s the perfect number. We each get to vent our feelings about the obstacle course of lit-biz to someone who knows exactly what we’re talking about, but more importantly, we provide each other with sympathetic but critical first readings. I’m particularly inclined to get out on a limb and risk a whole poem with a hit-or-miss pyrotechnic ending or a Jacobean twist, and Sarah has kind and rational ways of reminding me how much I’m gambling that readers will follow an undercurrent of image or association that may be completely eccentric. The writing process offers lots of opportunities to compromise or get lazy, and knowing that she’s going to read a poem is my greatest incentive to bring my whole self to every stage of composition. Even though I know a piece isn’t completely finished when I show it to her, I want to be sure that the fault is not due to a lack of commitment or relaxing of craft.

You’ve been the editor of Shenandoah for a dozen years and worked with various other journals since graduate school. For you as a writer, what are the benefits and drawbacks of dealing with so many manuscripts? How do you find time to read them all?
I’ve been editing one thing or another since my college newspaper, so writing and editing are tools on the same Swiss Army knife. Teaching is another. Although much of what an editor does is a kind of minor key creation, it doesn’t seem to pull from the same reservoir as actually writing. I’m convinced that helping others improve their work and get it before readers’ eyes is one of the most valuable things I do. And if I weren’t handling sheaves of magazine submissions for a living, it would probably be reams of student essays, stories, poems. Not many people who enter this profession of letters get off easy.
As for the quantity of manuscripts, it greatly diminishes my leisure reading time, but not my writing time. And after all, I’m able to perform what I hope is a knowing triage in order to decide which work demands to be read all the way through. As Samuel Johnson wrote, “It is not necessary to eat the entire ox to know that the meat is tough.” But when you get to discover and publish something fresh and accomplished, you’re grateful for the meal.

What’s your next writing project?
I’m trying to write a novel called Rock Bridge about a small-town mountain sheriff in Lexington around a hundred years ago. The rock bridge of the title is Virginia’s Natural Bridge, not far from where I live, and some of the action unfolds there. The narrative includes plenty of pursuit and punishment, temptation and horse trading, arson and hunting, betrayal and retribution. Full of ungoverned behavior, it’s beginning to resemble a William Burroughs version of “Titus Andronicus,” which may not be healthy. It’s about how a idealistic young man sees so much trespass, shiftiness and carnage that he himself grows colder over the years. I’m hoping redemption will eventually play a role, but so far, no soap. Keep your fingers crossed.

May, 2007

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