An Interview with Robert Gibb, Author of World over Water

Q: Does World over Water relate to the books that precede it?
Actually, World over Water completes a trilogy begun in The Origins of Evening and The Burning World, in which Homestead figures as a kind of epicenter—social, historical, autobiographical—“a world in which to hold the world” of the poems and their concerns, as MacLeish once wrote regarding Edwin Muir. Taken together the three books comprise an attempt to present the world of the mill town and what it meant to grow up there in the mid-twentieth century, to present material more typically found in the novel.

Q: How does World over Water differ from the other two books?
For one thing, the historical focus, “what it means / To live in history,” is given greater attention. There is, for instance, a section on the Homestead Lockout & Strike of 1892, which was one of the country’s pivotal events. When Frick and Carnegie broke the union here, they set back working class rights and aspirations for decades. For another, I think the canvas is broader as well, including the perspectives of painters and photographers who worked here, as well as the historical figures and, of course, the workers themselves.

Q: Why this material?
Well, place has always been important to me, as has history. Geography too—that whole nexus. I’m also concerned, in these three books, with how the personal and the public intertwine, their symbiosis. All culture is local, the saying goes. In a way Homestead was the Industrial Revolution. My ancestors worked in the mills. I worked in the mills. Now that way of life is gone, all those lives are gone. But not in the poems. There the Carnegies don’t get to have the last word.

Q: Memory would seem to be important?
Absolutely. Both the personal and the collective memory which is history. “’We are what we remember,’” the narrator of Brian Moore’s I Am Mary Dunne observes. It seems to me that statement is true on both the above-mentioned levels. As James Wright argued, there is no intelligence without the past. Without memory our residence in time would instead be a kind of Formica. And yet in an America where last year’s news is considered “ancient history,” the memory-hole is filled with places like Homestead.

Q: What about formal concerns?
You know, photographers like Lewis Hine and W. Eugene Smith were concerned with subject matter, but they were also in command of the formal properties and procedures of their art. The power of the imagination, it seems to me, is formal—the shaping of works and their content. Over the years I’ve been increasingly drawn to the formal properties of the poem as well as the music of words, the inflection of tone. In World over Water, for example, there’s a sonnet sequence as well as poems written in other traditional forms, such as terza rima. “If it ain’t rhymed up,” said the bluesman Furry Lewis, “it don’t sound good to me or nobody else.” A shop steward I talk to feels the same way.